


Chrysopoeia

by shadowen



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alchemy, Depression, Loki is a dick, M/M, Magic, Minor Character Death, References to Suicide, SHIELD Husbands, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-11
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-20 20:53:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/589537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowen/pseuds/shadowen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything comes with a price.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. nigredo

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Tag and Release](https://archiveofourown.org/works/439782) by [shadowen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowen/pseuds/shadowen). 



> WARNING: This story contains references to and graphic descriptions of attempted suicide, and a brief, non-explicit reference to non-consensual sex. Please proceed with caution.
> 
> This is a sequel and companion piece to my story ["Tag and Release"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/439782). I recommend reading that first and advise heeding the warnings there, as well.
> 
> Thanks to notthatheroine and coffesuperho for their flailing and support.

He didn’t question the seclusion, not at first. He didn’t ask why there was only one doctor and no other patients or why no one but Fury came to see him. For a week, he let Fury tell him that the recovery efforts were going well, the WSC were a bunch of dumbasses, and Clint was beat up but doing fine and missing him like crazy.

For a week, Phil quietly acquiesced to the solitude and folded his hands when they burned with the need to touch and feel that every last inch of Clint’s skin was solid and whole.

A week, as it turned out, was the limit of his patience.

“It’s time for me to go home, boss.”

Fury gave him a sympathetic look. “I’m afraid you can’t, soldier. Not yet.”

Phil knew that look, that voice. It was the one Fury used when he had to tell someone that an agent wasn’t coming back, that the doctors hadn’t been able to save the limb, that he was sorry but there was nothing he could do.

“No disrespect, sir,” Phil said, “but what aren’t you telling me?”

Fury lied. It was a condition of the job, and Phil had never faulted him for it. This lie, though, was a hard thing to swallow.

“You told them I was dead.”

“They needed the push,” Fury replied, and it had the tired staleness of an oft-repeated rationale.

That the lie had worked, that his supposed death had been the impetus for a team of heroes to save the world, was astonishing and humbling, but it was done. It was over. The world was saved, and Phil wanted to go home to his own bed and his husband. But that, apparently, wasn’t an option.

“There are other things going on. Bigger things,” Fury told him. “You’re dead, and I’ve got a job for you.”

It seemed a little on-the-nose, sending a dead man to infiltrate a death cult, but Phil had always appreciated those vicious ironies. In accordance with the necessities of deep cover, Philip James Delaware Coulson was laid to rest - temporarily, he hoped - and from his ashes rose Saul Everett Waverly, the sole survivor of a tragic car crash and a bona fide near-death experience.

Saul Waverly had no family, his wife had been killed in the accident, and his few friends had been driven away by his increased obsession with death and immortality. Phil sank into the new name, the new life, and let it lead him into the dark places where the followers of Thanos kept their time.

He surrendered everything, as he always had, and kept only an inch for himself. In that inch was the memory of Clint’s kisses and laughter and bad jokes and strong arms. In that inch was the endless wire that wrapped around Phil’s heart at one end and Clint’s at the other. In that inch was the conviction that, whatever he did and whoever he became, sooner or later, all paths would lead him home.

Saul Waverly was lost and lonely and grief-stricken, and the death-worshippers welcomed him with kind smiles and words meant to comfort. He listened and let them soothe him, and he nodded when they said that Thanos would bring peace, that all their struggles and suffering would be worth it when their god came to deliver them.

Saul Waverly believed them with all his soul. Phil Coulson, in the last inch of himself that survived, missed Clint. He made note of the cult members’ names and histories, and he missed Clint. He kept a map marked with safe houses and meeting sites, and he missed Clint. He filed away every arbitrary piece of information he could scrape together, and he missed Clint. He brushed his teeth, and he missed Clint. He rode the bus, and he missed Clint. He ate dinner alone, and he missed Clint.

The wound in his chest healed slowly. It ached and itched and drove him crazy, and he wondered sometimes if sending him into deep cover might be Fury’s version of an enforced vacation. He could still fire a gun and defend himself, if he had to, which was some comfort. Saul Waverly had no enemies, no reason to keep a .40 caliber Beretta G Centurion and silencer in a duffle bag in his closet, packed tight with spare clothes, assorted documents, and tactical gear. He hoped he wouldn’t have to explain that one to anybody.

“What was she like?”

One of his fellow acolytes was a young woman, slight and wide-eyed and uncommonly clever. Phil liked her, despite her fearful zealotry, and Saul Waverly found himself reluctantly befriended.

“Who?”

“Your wife.”

Saul Waverly had a wife, Marian, a beautiful woman, his childhood sweetheart. She had died in the same accident that drove a piece of rebar through his chest.

“She was....” He tried to summon the memories and tone of a grieving husband, but all he could think about was Clint. “She was incredible. Fearless. And stubborn. No matter... no matter what happened, she’d come back swinging and cracking jokes.” He thought of Clint laughing through busted lips, eyes shining through bruises. “Granted, they were usually bad jokes, but they made me laugh.”

The young woman smiled gently and laid a hand on his arm. “You’ll see her again,” she promised. “When Thanos comes, we’ll all live together in Death.”

Saul Waverly was comforted. The last living inch of Phil Coulson was nothing but sick for home.

That night, he dreamed. In the months since his so-called death, his nightmares had been haunted by the cold chill of magic slicing through him, by Loki’s mocking voice, and by images of Clint, broken in Loki’s hands, so far beyond Phil’s reach. 

In this dream, though, the scepter’s blade skewers him as always, but the grip that holds it is Clint’s. Phil watches his own wound appear as a raw, red hole in Clint’s chest. Blood pours down Clint’s arms, seeps from his mouth, and runs in crimson streams from his ice-veiled eyes.

Clint’s voice is thick and wet and echoless, and the words are garbled noises, meaningless.

There is a gun in Phil’s hand. He raises it and shoots Clint between the eyes. Clint smiles, wide and red, and his eyes are the bright blue of summer skies.

Phil woke up suddenly, his eyes wet and burning.

It was easy enough, once he’d stopped shaking, to hack the wireless feed from the security cameras in their apartment that SHIELD didn’t think he knew about. Fury had assured him, calmly and repeatedly, that Clint was fine, that he’d shaken off Loki’s hold and didn’t seem to be suffering any lasting effects, but Phil needed to see for himself. He covered his tracks so the digital incursion wouldn’t be immediately spotted and tried not to feel like a stalker - or a ghost - as he pulled up the live video.

Clint wasn’t there.

Every room was empty, and Phil pushed back a rising sense of dread as he paged through the screens. Clint could be at the range or on the helicarrier or even in Stark Tower, for all Phil knew. Just because he wasn’t home in the middle of the night didn’t mean there was anything wrong.

Clint’s shoe was on the bed. It was one of his trainers, a birthday gift from Phil, given with the insistence that combat boots were not appropriate for casual jogging. He’d thrown it at Phil’s head during their last brief stop, before Phil had gone to monitor an op for Natasha and Clint had been sent to keep an eye on Selvig and the tesseract.

_That is not funny,_ he’d said, but he’d been grinning. Phil didn’t remember what wasn’t funny or why Clint had been holding the shoe.

_It’s hilarious._ Phil had caught the trainer and tossed it idly on the bed. _My sense of humor is rated as a class four deadly weapon._

Clint had laughed and kissed him and said, _I always knew you were trying to kill me._

They hadn’t made love, there hadn’t been time, and Phil had spent the next few days trying to focus on crisis management and not the memory of Clint’s calloused fingers on the back of his neck.

The shoe was still there, lying on its side against the pillow as Phil had left it. Clint hadn’t been home.

He closed the video feed and expunged all evidence of his meddling. Hacking into the SHIELD data servers was more difficult, and a wet, rainy afternoon was well underway by the time he cracked the last firewall and started searching through the current level five activity reports.

Clint wasn’t on assignment. He wasn’t confined to the base or under medical observation or accounted for at all in any of the general case files. His personnel brief listed his current status as “Unknown”.

It was an innocuous word, but for Phil it was a sudden chasm splitting the center of his certainty. “Unknown” didn’t mean missing or compromised or undisclosed. “Unknown” meant runaway, off the grid. “Unknown” was the word used for agents who had gone rogue but hadn’t yet turned against SHIELD.

There was a standing “maintain surveillance but do not engage” advisement to all agents, and the brief concluded with a list of recent sightings, none of which were confirmed and all of which, Phil knew, were wrong. Clint had gone to ground, and SHIELD would never find him.

Sure things were nonexistent in this line of work, but there were certain foundations upon which Phil built his peace of mind. That he could trust Clint - completely, implicitly, in all things, instances of magic mind-control aside - was the foremost of these. Second to that was his equally unshakeable - if somewhat more guarded - trust in Fury and the understanding that, if anything ever happened to Clint, he had to know. Somehow, someway, someone would get word to him, whatever the risk.

Chilling dread took root in the pit of Phil’s stomach and froze the air in his lungs. Echoes of the nightmare clattered inside his head, blood and ice and Clint’s desperate smile, and that last remaining inch of him railed against the training and duty and reason that told him to push it aside, put it away, that the job was more important and there was nothing he could do.

He thought of calloused fingers on his neck, of a low voice in his ear, of the cold press of metal tags against his chest and their weight when the man whose name they bore was so impossibly far. He thought of late nights and laundry day and dirty boots by the door. He thought of _home_ , and what use was saving the world if everything good was burned down in the battle?

Three hours later, he was on a train.

Saul Waverly made excuses, told those who might miss him that he was visiting his wife’s cousin in New York. Phil Coulson gathered his notes on the Thanos cult and secured them in a storage locker used as a SHIELD drop point for agents in the field. Rail travel was slower than he would have liked, but it kept him under the radar just a little longer.

Every worst-case scenario he had ever imagined cycled through his head like a grisly carnival ride. He knew two hundred and thirty-seven ways to kill a person without the use of traditional weapons. He knew four hundred and eleven ways to inflict debilitating pain without causing permanent physical damage. In his mind, he saw every last one of them visited on Clint.

His mission priorities had been superseded, the parameters had changed. This was a new mission. Objective one: locate target, Barton, Clinton F. Objective two: secure target. Objective three: love, cherish, and protect target with all that he had to the end of his days, just as he’d vowed to do.

_Locate. Secure. Love._ Phil repeated the objectives to himself like a prayer. _Locate. Secure. Love._ There was no god to hear it, but he needed faith in nothing but his own skills and in the inch of himself that would never surrender. _Locate. Secure. Love._ The constant litany helped keep the circling horrors at bay in his mind.

He rubbed absently at the healing gash in his chest and willed the train to move faster.

He found the apartment in Sofia, found the cups still sitting on the table and the empty liquor bottles in bags by the door. He found Clint’s jacket lying discarded on the floor and picked it up. Clint was long gone, his tags stuck in the jacket’s inside pocket, and the traces of him that remained were colored with despair.

Phil sat down, holding tight to the crumpled jacket. The smell of Clint lingered in the lining, was embedded in the worn edges inside the collar. It was the smell of sweat and leather and gun oil and the faint, smooth spice that was nothing in Phil’s mind but the touch and taste of that warm skin.

Clint was gone, unknown, off the grid, and Phil had nothing of him to cling to but a discarded jacket and dog tags. He put on the tags and laid a hand on his chest, feeling the cold metal against his skin, Clint’s name stamped on his heart like the return address to a house that wasn’t there.

“Where did you go?” he said, but there was no answer from the cold, empty apartment.

“Where are you?” he asked, and the question echoed in that one remaining inch of him.

Folding the jacket under his head, he lay down on the hard mattress and slept for the first time in three days.

He dreamed of Clint and he dreamed of ice and he did not sleep soundly.

Once upon a time, Phil had been sent to hunt down a fugitive who was either a vigilante, an assassin, or an up-and-coming super villain, depending on the report. The target was smart, highly trained, and had a history of transience, and SHIELD spent the better part of a year chasing him. When Phil got the assignment, he’d read through the briefs, accumulated additional research, established a multi-level network search along specified data parameters, and waited. When the pursuit finally became physical, he knew exactly where the target was and what he was doing.

Once upon a time had ended with a bullet wound and a certain kind of happily ever after, and Phil was grateful every day that Clint had run instead of taking a shot.

He’d be mobile, he always was, so Phil hunkered down in the empty apartment and set his search. The parameters were different, the mission changed, and he had to call in one large and long-standing favor to get what he needed. Still, the objective was the same: locate and secure the target.

He set his search and waited and folded his legs when his feet ached to run out the door and chase Clint to the ends of the earth. He kept the tags around his neck and slept with the jacket folded under his head.

It was a month before the patterns in the static finally coalesced into something he could hear, whispered rumors repeated enough to become a story. There was someone new, a gun for hire with frightening skills and the kind of aim that couldn’t be real. No alias, no face, no firsthand accounts. Just a story and the cynical awe of those who knew where respect was due.

It was another month before Phil finally got a lead.

“I don’t care who you are.” He’d scaled three floors and taken down five bodyguards to get here, standing over this cowering man who was nothing. “I don’t care what you hired him for or why. I just want to know where he is.”

He’d tried to be reasonable, he really had, but some people only responded to threats.

“I don’t know. Please, god, I don’t know,” the man sobbed. The sitting leader of a mid-level syndicate and a little knocking around had him wailing like a child.

Phil sighed. “How did you find him?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t. He came to me.” The man was babbling, barely intelligible around his broken teeth. “I put out the word, and he came. I don’t know. I don’t know who he was.”

_I do._ “Has anyone else put the word out recently?”

“I don’t know. There’s always somebody looking. I don’t know.”

It wasn’t much, but it was more than he’d had, one more inch. “Thank you very much,” Phil said pleasantly. “You’ve been very helpful.”

After that, he abandoned the cold, empty apartment in Sofia. After that came the legwork, the walking and searching and nights spent in dark places, listening for whispers of contracts, of jobs for those with the skills to do them. There were always jobs, there was always someone looking, but only a handful would be appealing to the world’s greatest marksman.

By the time he heard about the job, it was already taken. By some punk, they said. Some guy with a sharp eye and a smart mouth, they said. Nobody knew his name. The job was in Tehran, they said, and it was dangerous.

By the time he made it to Tehran, it wasn’t hard to trace the trail of mayhem left by a dangerous job gone catastrophically wrong.

By the time he found Clint, the shooting was over, and he was so very nearly too late.

He never learned exactly what happened, what failed or how Clint had been found out, but Phil didn’t think very highly of any situation that resulted in a gun to Clint’s head.

“Sure, whatever, I fucked you over. So fucking _shoot me!_ ”

Clint’s voice was rough, strained, and it scraped across Phil’s heart like fingernails. He hugged the wall, kept to what little cover there was for fear that any interruption would put the last bit of pressure on that trigger.

“ _Shoot me!_ ”

This could not be real, could not be happening. This pale, hollow-eyed man was a stranger clothed in Clint’s skin, begging for death with Clint’s mouth.

“You fucking asshole, just shoot!”

The man was scowling and Clint was shouting and Phil gripped his gun in both hands and this wasn’t happening.

“ _Shoot!_ ”

Phil didn’t even know he’d fired until the recoil shook up his arms, and pain throbbed through the healing wound in his chest. Silence fell in the cold space, and he hunched over, trying to steady his breathing.

“Who’s there? Natasha?”

It struck him, then, and Phil felt suddenly foolish and blind. Clint thought he was dead, had been lied to and led into this endless grief. There would be no tears and open arms, only suspicion and disbelieving despair.

“Are you following me? Making sure I don’t do anything stupid?”

Clint kept calling into the silence, and all Phil’s answers were choked off by that one, jagged inch of himself. He was paralyzed, aching with the need to speak, to rush forward, to reel in that tethering wire wrapped around his heart at one end and Clint’s at the other.

Then Clint lifted the dead man’s gun to his head, and Phil’s breath stopped.


	2. albedo

The blood on his hands was a bright, unreal red, slick and shining under the glaring hospital lights. When the medics pulled Clint away and told Phil to _wait here_ , his palm came apart from Clint’s with a sticky, wet slide.

Once upon a time, he’d been sent to bring in a target, and Phil had been grateful every day since that he hadn’t aimed an inch to the left.

Now he was sitting in an empty hallway in a military hospital in Tehran, and his arms were drenched to the elbows with Clint’s bright red blood.

He felt sick.

“Sir?”

The junior agent standing in front of him looked wide-eyed and out of her depth. She also looked like she’d been standing there for a while. There was a slim, black phone in her hand.

“Sir, Director Fury is on the line.”

Phil took the phone with a nod and saw again the wet red on his hand.

“Director.”

“ _Agent Coulson_.” Fury’s voice was flat, professional, and Phil could have reached through the phone to strangle him. “ _What happened?_ ”

_My husband put a gun in his mouth, and it’s your fault._ “You lied.”

There was a sound like a sigh. “ _They needed the push. You know that,_ ” Fury said, and it was even more stale and empty now than the first time Phil had heard it.

“You lied to _him_ ,” Phil snapped. “You let him think....” His chest was tight with rage and fear, and Clint’s blood was wet and cold on his hands. “You let him think I was dead, and he tried to kill himself.”

The long silence that stretched on the line, on top of the silence of the hospital, was cacophonous. “ _Tried,_ ” Fury repeated at last. “ _You said he tried_.”

“He didn’t.... I stopped him, but....” Phil ran a hand down his face before he remembered the red, and now Clint’s blood was on his brow and on his lips and smeared across his eyes.

“ _I’m scrambling medical transport. Get him back to base as soon as he’s stable to move._ ”

Phil thought of the S.H.I.E.L.D. observation rooms, cold and bare and exposed. “I’m not bringing him back just so you can lock him up in psych. Sir.”

“ _I’ll lock you up with him, if that makes you happy,_ ” Fury shot back. Phil had a very particular reply in mind as to what would make him happy, but Fury went on, “ _Coulson, there were... complications with some of Loki’s thralls. You need to bring Barton in._ ”

Phil had nightmares in which Clint never escaped Loki’s grasp, terrible dreams of him frozen and dying and utterly alien, and every last one of those horrors now flashed before his eyes.

“ _Coulson,_ ” Fury said, “ _bring him in._ ”

Phil switched off the phone and handed it back to the junior agent, who offered him a damp towel in return. He looked from the towel to the agent, confused, before he remembered that the blood he was covered in wasn’t supposed to be there.

“Thank you,” he said, and the agent gave him a sympathetic smile. Red stains stayed on his fingernails as he wiped the rest away, and he knew that Clint’s blood would always be on his hands, stained deeper than any water and rags could clean away.

He kept wiping his hands until the towel was stained all over, until the bright, wet red was gone. He kept wiping his hands until there was nothing left to clean, until his skin was soft and raw and tearing. The junior agent gently pried the towel from his fingers and took it away.

Later, he learned that the surgery to remove the bullet and repair Clint’s shoulder took sixty-four minutes, that it was clean and straightforward and that Clint was never in any real danger. It felt like a lifetime, and he was more and more certain with every second that ticked by that he would never see Clint again.

The junior agent brought him food that he ate without tasting and coffee that he wished he couldn’t taste. She never said a word, just stayed close and watchful.

When the doctor finally appeared, Phil zeroed in on key words and took in little else. He heard _clean shot, very weak, severe anemia,_ and, most importantly, _stable and sleeping_.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s in recovery, but you really should- Sir!” The doctor called after him, but Phil was already moving.

The recovery ward was as spare and efficient as the rest of the hospital, and Clint looked unaccountably small and fraill amid all the white planes and sharp edges. There were tubes and wires and bandages and a machine keeping time with Clint’s blessedly beating heart, and there was nothing for Phil to do but sit and wait.

He sat, and he took one of Clint’s strong hands between his own.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said softly. “I’m sorry I left you. Never again.”

There were dark bruises under Clint’s eyes, and even asleep his face was drawn and pale. Phil held fast and waited, listening to the beeping of the machine and trying to keep the word _complications_ out of his head.

The junior agent took up a post outside the door and admitted no one except the nurse, who entered some time later to check Clint’s vitals.

Clint slept on, and Phil sat and waited and held fast to his hand.

The junior agent brought more food and more coffee and paused as if there was something she wanted to say.

“Thank you, agent,” Phil said, because he had no energy for questions and no stomach for comfort.

She nodded. “Yes, sir. Just... shout if you need anything.”

She resumed her post, and Phil sat and waited and held fast to Clint’s hand.

He wanted to talk, to fill up the silence and explain that he’d been in deep cover, that he hadn’t known, that he’d spent every second of those long months aching for home, aching for Clint. He clenched his jaw and held fast to Clint’s hand and said nothing. There would be time. All the words he’d been storing up would come in calm, measured doses, and Clint would hear them and he would.... Well, he would probably punch Phil in the eye, then kiss him, then yell for a while and kiss him again.

For the first time in months, Phil smiled. There would be time. Clint would wake up, exhausted and angry, and they would weather this together. They always had.

At around two a.m., Phil was snapped out of a light doze by the peculiar racket of raised voices and clanging metal. Clint shifted in his sleep, and his fingers curled reflexively around Phil’s. Phil thought of waking him, in case the noise signaled trouble and they needed to move, but as he reached out, he listened again to the clatter. The clatter, Phil realized, of clanging metal footsteps.

Tony Stark burst into the room like a knight crashing through a tower door, the junior agent bobbing ineffectually at his shoulder. The helmet of the suit was retracted, and he should have looked ridiculous in his shining armor with his dark hair sticking out at odd angles. When he saw Phil, though, he stopped dead, and he just looked overwhelmed and lost.

“What do you want, Stark?”

Stark’s sharp eyes darted from Phil to Clint, and Phil saw it, the moment Stark pulled himself together and got back into character, the moment the mask came down. “It would seem, Agent Coulson, that rumors of your death have been greatly exaggerated.”

“It would seem.”

Stark nodded toward Clint, and the corners of his mouth hardened. “And Robin Hood’s just having a little catnap, there?”

Phil looked back at Clint, sleeping through it all. “He’s.... He’ll be fine.”

“Good, good. He, uh, had a hard time. With you, y’know, being dead, and everything.” Stark seemed to swallow back whatever emotion was trying to crawl out of his mouth and went on with half a smile. “Nothing like Cap, though. I tell you, there are few things in this world more depressing than seeing a super soldier mope. He spent a week watching James Bond movies and mainlining rocky road. When he gets here, he’s probably going to cry on you, just so you’re warned.”

Phil blinked. “Captain Rogers is coming here,” he said slowly. “Why?”

“Well, to see you. And bird boy, over there,” Stark said. “They were right behind me in the jet. Should be here any minute.”

“They?”

“Rogers, Romanov, and Banner. Jarvis gave me an alert when your I.D. code popped up. Then there was the report that Barton had been shot, and, well, I tossed Romanov the keys and took off.” Stark fixed him with a sharp look. “I’m guessing, here, that him getting shot and you not being dead are sort of plot points in the same story. A story, by the way, that I expect to be told in great detail in the very near future.”

It was only then that Phil realized his hand was still wrapped around Clint’s. Stark had made no comment, though, and Phil was loath to surrender that small point of contact unless absolutely necessary. Clint’s skin was cold, and Phil held tighter.

“The two are... related, yes,” he admitted, and that small fragment of truth could not begin to encompass his guilt. “That’s all I can tell you.”

Stark was silent for a moment, studying him. “I’m getting a little tired of all this cloak-and-dagger bullshit,” he said at last. “I mean, I get that it’s part of the game, that’s how spying works, whatever. Mostly, I object on principle. I don’t like being manipulated.” His eyes narrowed. “But, from where I’m standing, it looks to me like Fury fed us one huge fuck-off pile of crap, and now his lying has put one of our team in the hospital.” Slowly, dangerously, he concluded, “And that is not okay.”

Phil met Stark’s glare and, unexpectedly, saw in it a shadow of his own rage. “No,” he agreed, “it’s not.”

Stark nodded. “I’m thinking of clever and excruciating ways to make Fury pay for this. Suggestions are welcome.”

Phil tightened his grip on Clint’s hand and muttered, “I’ve got a few ideas.”

The junior agent, still lingering behind Stark, put a hand to her earpiece. “Uh, sir? I believe the rest of your team has arrived.”

Sure enough, Natasha appeared in the doorway minutes later, followed closely by Rogers, Banner, and a small crowd of confused medical workers and security personnel. Natasha marched straight across the room and slapped Phil in the face.

“I deserved that,” he admitted.

“I’ll say you did,” Rogers agreed.

Banner gave him a shy smile and glanced at Clint with concern. “May I?” he asked, gesturing toward Clint’s chart at the foot of the bed. Phil just nodded, more than a little overwhelmed.

“Sir, I think we’ve all got a lot of questions,” Rogers said evenly, and Phil would never get used to being addressed by Captain America as ‘sir’. “But there’s an inbound S.H.I.E.L.D. transport about ten minutes behind us, and I’m wondering how we feel about that.” He didn’t return the salute that the junior agent was so resolutely holding.

“Suspicious?” Stark offered. “Belligerent? Generally displeased with the current state of affairs?”

“Angry,” Banner said dryly.

Natasha muttered a very rude word in Russian.

Phil cleared his throat. This, he could do. This was strategy and a plan of action, so much easier than sitting and waiting and holding fast to Clint’s hand. “To address your first concern, Captain Rogers, I promise a comprehensive debriefing at a more convenient time,” he said. “As to the question of my feelings about being taken into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, I can tell you that I agree wholeheartedly with Mister Stark, Doctor Banner, and Agent Romanov.”

Rogers nodded, but before he could respond, the whole room fell silent at the thin, ragged whisper of Clint’s voice.

“Can’t a guy get some peace and quiet?”

Phil hadn’t known until that moment how desperately he’d missed that sound. He turned to find Clint watching him with hazy, heavy-lidded eyes.

“Hey.”

Phil ignored the pricking in his eyes and the tightness in his throat. “Hey yourself.”

Clint closed his eyes again and wrapped his fingers tight around Phil’s. No one else could have seen the thin tears that tracked down over his clenched jaw.

“Alright, folks,” Rogers announced, “Agent Barton needs his rest, and we’re gonna see that he gets it. Tony and I will run interference with S.H.I.E.L.D.. Bruce, see what you can get from the doctors. Natasha, no one comes in this room without Agent Coulson’s permission.” He turned his captain’s stare at last on the junior agent still holding her salute. “What’s your name, soldier?”

“Bishop, sir.”

“Well, Agent Bishop, it’s time to decide whose side you’re on.”

She cast a glance at Phil. “Sir, I have standing orders to remain with Agent Coulson at all times. So I suppose I’m on his side, sir.”

Rogers rewarded her with a smile. “Good answer. Stand guard with Agent Romanov,” he ordered and finally returned the salute.

Phil barely understood what was happening. He didn’t know if they were rallying for him or for Clint or just because they were inclined to piss off Fury. Whatever the reason, knowing that Earth’s mightiest heroes had his back made him feel a little less like the world was falling apart.

He just sat and waited and held fast to Clint’s hand. Clint returned the grip and remained still and silent.

What happened next was largely a blur in Phil’s memory. He later gathered that, through a combination of intimidation, wheedling, and some impressive manipulation on Banner’s part, Rogers had convinced the transport commander that the security of Agents Coulson and Barton was vital to the Avengers Initiative and, by extension, to the safety of the world. He may or may not have implied that, should Agent Coulson set foot in a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, the stability of the United States government might be undermined, and it would be best for everyone all around if the two of them were housed at Stark Tower where the rest of the team could look out for them.

Phil almost felt sorry for the man who had to argue with Captain America. Almost.

The long flight to New York passed in a haze of exhaustion and the feel of Clint’s fingers clasped in his own. He had enough awareness, upon arriving at the tower, to be impressed that Stark had managed to have a small medical team waiting for them and a suite prepared that was equal parts recovery ward and bedroom.

All Phil really remembered about those long hours, though, was falling at last into bed with the weight of Clint’s head on his shoulder and the cool touch of two sets of dog tags lying on his chest.

He held that memory close long after it had faded into a sepia maze of faint smells and half-felt touches. Even as he dropped to sleep, he felt it was the moment of grateful waking at the end of a long nightmare, like he had finally come home.

The next day, Phil found that home was further than it had ever been, and everything got so much worse.

He had always been a patient man. It was one of the reasons he and Clint worked so well. He was the quiet courage to Clint’s brash daring, the discretion to Clint’s valor. His anger was slow and cold, and he seldom lashed out.

Perhaps it was the rarity of it that made punching his best friend and commanding officer in the face so very satisfying.

“I deserved that,” Fury admitted.

“I’ll say you did,” Stark agreed. “I’d say that punch was on behalf of all of us, but I’ve got payback plans of my own.”

Fury just sighed and rubbed his jaw. “Where’s Barton?”

“Sleeping,” Rogers replied, adding, “Natasha’s with him,” as if daring Fury or anyone else to try and get past Natasha.

Phil’s hand ached, and the still-aching wound in his chest throbbed from the punch and the gunshot recoil of the previous day. The one had made him feel better, and the other had saved Clint’s life. He told himself the pain was worth it, was worth everything, and tried not to remember the bright red blood on his hands.

“You said there were complications.” He planted his feet and did not pace. “From Loki’s brainwashing.”

“ _Complications?_ Wow, Fury, you’ve got this vague and ominous thing down to an art.” Stark was sprawled in a chair with, predictably, a tumbler of scotch in one hand. He was doing an excellent imitation of someone who didn’t especially care, even if Phil knew better.

Fury, for his part, pretended Stark hadn’t spoken. “Three months ago, Erik Selvig went to medical with what he thought was the flu. He complained of fatigue, and bloodwork showed serious anemia and a mild level of jaundice. No obvious cause of either. His doctor was a little puzzled.” Banner sat forward, interested, and Fury went on, “About a week later, one of our security specialists checked in with the same symptoms. Right after that, a senior analyst came forward. Since then, four other agents have presented, all with the same symptoms. No history, no cause, no cure, and nothing in common.”

“Except Loki,” Rogers said.

“Except Loki.”

“Barton had them, too,” Banner put in. “Dermatitis, anemia, jaundice. I thought it had to do with the malnutrition.”

“Wait, wait,” Rogers interrupted. “Malnutrition?”

“Based on the doctors’ observations and estimated weight loss, I’d say he’s been living on whiskey and wheat thins for the last six months.” Banner gave Phil an apologetic look, though which of the hundred terrible things about this situation he was apologizing for, Phil had no idea. “He was in bad shape, even before he got shot.”

Stark put up a hand and raised an eyebrow at Phil. “Which happened how, exactly? I’m still not clear on that.”

“I shot him.”

Shocked silence and horrified eyes fell on Phil like a blow. It was all he could do to remain standing under the weight of his own admission, and he wasn’t prepared to offer explanation, not then, not yet. There were still flakes of Clint’s blood under his fingernails.

“Okay then. Moving on.” Stark cleared his throat. “So we’ve got, what? Magic mind-whammy withdrawal? Some kind of weird soul cancer?”

“We honestly don’t know.” Fury’s stare lingered on Phil a moment longer, then dragged away. “But it’s getting worse.”

Clint got pneumonia, once. He’d walked around for a week, insisting he was fine, until he coughed up a mouthful of blood. He was a terrible patient, had sulked and complained through every minute of the ordeal. Phil had threatened to sedate him on a number of occasions and had gone through with it on one.

“Getting worse how?” Banner asked.

“No matter what treatment the doctors throw at them, the patients’ iron levels keep dropping and their organs can’t keep up for shit,” Fury explained. “If Barton’s malnourished on top of that-”

“Jarvis, find a medical contractor. We’re gonna turn Barton’s floor into a hospital.” Stark jumped from his chair and immediately pulled up a floor plan of the tower on the nearest monitor. “A temporary hospital,” he amended. “And not too hospital-y. We want him to get better, not die of boredom.”

“We could use the secondary bio lab for research.” Banner went to stand beside Stark, indicating an area on the display.

“I thought you were using that?”

Banner shrugged. “I can move that experiment. This is important.”

“Okay, awesome. Let’s do that. Jarvis, who’s the....” Stark paused. “Are there experts on magical diseases? Is that even what this.... Y’know what, Jarvis, cross-reference the symptoms and all the weird alien brainwashing stuff and give me some likely candidates. I wanna know who’s the best, and I want them here tomorrow.”

“ _Yes, sir. Shall I include S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel in the search?_ ”

Stark shot Fury a look and replied, “Sure, why not? Those mad scientist types could be useful.”

“You okay with this, sir?” Rogers asked, and it was a long, empty moment before Phil realized that the question was meant for him.

He was really very much not okay with anything that was happening and wanted nothing more than to go back to their small, spare apartment and curl up in bed with Clint while the nightmare passed them by. “It’s up to Clint,” he managed, “but Stark Tower is better suited for long-term care and better equipped for research into a solution. And, at the moment, it’s probably more secure than the helicarrier.”

He didn’t say that he felt safer here, with superhumans closing ranks around him, or that it might be a long time before Clint wanted to be anywhere near a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility again. He didn’t say that he wasn’t sure what he would do if he found himself in the same place where Nick Fury slept.

“Are you kidding?” Stark said, still poking at the display. “With these security upgrades, you couldn’t get a cockroach in here without a retinal scan.” He turned to point a finger at Phil. “I wanna talk to you about that, by the way. The new protocols are good, but I want this place to be Coulson-proof.” He paused. “I mean, not actually Coulson-proof, obviously, since you live here, but, like S.H.I.E.L.D.-proof. Speaking of which. Fury? Get the hell out of my house.”

Fury stood, scowling, but the look he gave Phil was serious and very nearly sympathetic. “Agent Coulson?”

They’d been best friends, brothers in arms, and Phil had spent half his life playing dutiful second chair. _You should have told him,_ he thought. _You should have told me._ He turned his back without a word and stared at the ground until he heard the door close on Fury’s fading footsteps.

“I really hate that guy,” Stark muttered. Nobody disagreed.

Phil let out a breath and sank onto the couch. His knees were shaking. His hands were shaking. His whole existence felt like it was rattling to pieces. Clint would be fine, he told himself. Clint was safe in a room one floor down with Natasha watching over him. They would find an answer, they would weather this, and they would go home.

Rogers sat down beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’s gonna be alright,” he said gently. “We’ve got the two smartest guys on the planet. If anybody can figure this out, they will.”

Phil nodded and clasped his hands to steady them. He didn’t answer, didn’t trust himself to speak.

Jarvis spoke up, then, and Phil would have sworn it sounded concerned. “ _Agent Coulson, sir, I believe Agent Romanov may be in need of assistance._ ”

Beside him, Rogers stiffened and Stark perked up. “What’s the problem, Jarvis?”

“ _Sir, Agent Barton is awake and... agitated._ ”

Phil was up and running two seconds ahead of Rogers, and he was sure that Stark did something to make the elevator go faster.

The lights in the room were low, soothing, but the warm tones could not mask the dark bruises under Clint’s eyes or the sheen of sickly sweat on his skin. The shadows cast his features into sharp relief and made him look gaunt and haunted. He was backed against the wall, one hand pressed to the bleeding bullet wound in his shoulder. In his other hand was a butterfly knife, held up like a warning, too near his own throat to be defensive.

Natasha was keeping a safe distance, speaking slowly and calmly. They both looked up as Phil came through the door, and Clint’s eyes widened, panicked and confused.

Phil’s stomach tightened. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t the fierce, undaunted husband he’d left behind. This pale, hollow-eyed man was a stranger clothed in Clint’s skin, masquerading as Phil’s home and heart.

Clint looked back to Natasha and pointed toward Phil with the knife.

“Real?” he whispered.

Natasha nodded, and Clint slid to his knees, the knife falling from his grip. Phil was beside him in an instant, arms around his shoulders, gathering him in.

“I’m real. I’m here. It’s okay. You’re okay,” he murmured into Clint’s hair, as Natasha sat back on the bed with a sigh.

“What happened?” Clint demanded. “Where are we? What happened?” He blinked up at Phil. “You were.... You _shot_ me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Phil held him tighter and ignored Natasha’s raised eyebrow.

Clint swallowed, and his eyes darted around the room. He was so pale, so thin. There was so little left of him. “Stark.... We’re in Stark Tower? I was.... I was gonna.... Oh my god.” He looked at Phil, then, hard and clear and open. “You’re not dead.”

There it was, a flicker of the bright beacon that never failed to lead him back here, back home. Phil smiled. “I’m not dead.”

Clint gave him a weak scowl. “Fury’s an asshole.”

“Fury’s an asshole,” Phil agreed.

Clint looked away, looked at Natasha sitting on the rumpled bed and Rogers still standing awkwardly in the doorway. When his gaze came back to Phil, it was soft and glazed. “Hey, boss?”

Phil ran a thumb gently across Clint’s brow, across the furrows and cold sweat. “Yeah?”

“Gonna throw up, now.”

It was a testament to Natasha’s reflexes that she managed to get a trash bin under Clint’s head in time. Phil just held Clint up, rubbing soothing circles on his back, and prayed for a break in this storm.

Stark made good on his plans, and soon the entire floor was quickly and quietly outfitted to deal with any and every medical crisis that might arise. He and Banner stole two medical researchers from S.H.I.E.L.D. - presumably with bribes of cutting edge equipment and a less hazardous work environment - and dedicated significant resources to what Stark referred to as the Loki is a Dick Lab.

Clint slept and woke and wouldn’t eat and kept grumbling that he was fine. The wound in his shoulder kept oozing bright, red blood that seeped around stitches and soaked through bandages. Phil didn’t sleep and stayed close to Clint.

“We have to...” he started, and Clint looked at him with wary, weary eyes. “Can we... talk? About what happened.”

Clint looked away, pressing at the wound in his shoulder. “Nothing to talk about,” he said. “You were gone. I got bad. You came back. I got better. The end.”

_The end._ It wouldn’t be the end until one or both of them were in the ground, because happily ever after was just what happened between the first kiss and the last. He pressed his lips to Clint’s brow and didn’t say, _I missed you._

Clint pulled away, standing. “I was in a bad place, okay? I went a little off the rails.” He gave Phil half a smile. “You pulled me back, like you always do.”

If Phil hadn’t been there, if he’d been just seconds later, if he hadn’t broken orders, if he hadn’t trusted his own instinct instead of Fury. If one turn in one hundred had been different, the story would have ended in ashes on the other side of the world, and Phil never would have known.

“I always will,” Phil promised, and hoped it was true.

By the time Pepper returned from whatever world-running business commitment she’d been attending, a portion of Stark Tower had become a state-of-the-art medical facility, and she had, thankfully, been updated on the changes. When she came home, Phil was going over existing research on the after-effects of mind control, cross-referenced with reports of contact with magical objects.

There were tears in her eyes, bright, honest, heartfelt tears, and she gave him a long, tight hug. When she pulled away, she punched him hard in the shoulder, scowling even as she cried.

“How _could_ you?” she demanded. “How could you _do_ that? You just went off and let everyone think you were... you....” She punched him again. “You _asshole_!”

It was strange, in this place full of people so inured to tragedy, to be faced with a normal, healthy emotional response. It was strange, Phil thought, to realize that there was anyone in his life even capable of normal emotion.

“I’m sorry, Pepper. I couldn’t....”

“What were you even thinking, going after a... a _god_ by yourself?” She put a hand over her eyes as if she was just exasperated with this whole saving the world business. “This is my life, now. It was bad enough watching Tony go off and get _shot at_ , but now I’m surrounded by heroes and it seems like every time I turn on the news, well there’s Steve fighting some evil monsters. And Natasha leaves for weeks at a time, and I never know if she’s coming back. And Bruce... oh, god, Bruce. And of course you went and... you _died_ , and the worst part.... Do you know the worst part, aside from losing my only friend? The worst part, Agent Phil Coulson, was finding out that you lied to me. From _Tony_.”

Phil blinked. “That I...?”

“All that time,” Pepper said. “All those times I told you _everything_ , about Tony and work and my mother and my whole life, and the only thing you ever talked about that was even remotely personal was that _you were dating some cellist._ ”

“Oh.” It was easily the smallest, weakest, thinnest lie he had ever told, but, in that moment, he was sure it was the worst. “Oh, Pepper. I didn’t mean t-”

“And then Tony... _Tony_ , who thought your first name was _Agent_... Tony tells me that you’re _married_?” She wasn’t pacing. Pepper Potts didn’t pace. She was standing directly in front of him, dressing him down more thoroughly than any drill sergeant he’d ever seen. “And not only are you married, apparently, but your _husband_ is also a world-class assassin and _superhero_ , and he’s on some kind of suicidal bender and....”

She stopped suddenly, clasping her hands over her mouth. “Oh my god. Tony said he was sick. Is he okay?” Just like that, the anger was gone, subsumed by concern for someone she had never met.

“He’s....” _Fine. He’ll be alright. It’s nothing serious._ “He’s not good.”

“Oh, Phil. I’m so sorry.” She hugged him again, and he had never in his life been more grateful for simple human empathy. “If anyone can figure out what to do, it’s Tony and Bruce. You know that.”

He nodded, because he was counting on that the way he counted on his next breath drawing air into his lungs.

“I know it’s not the best time,” Pepper went on, “but I’d really like to meet him.”

Phil thought of Clint’s sickly skin and seeping wound and tried to remember the last time he’d heard Clint laugh. “He’s not exactly himself, right now.”

“I know that,” Pepper said. “I know, and if you want to wait until he’s better, I completely understand. It’s just....” She blushed lightly, and that was another thing Phil had forgotten normal people did. “I mean, a secret marriage, soldiers in love, how you kind of came back from the dead for him. It’s a little bit romantic.”

“It’s really not.” There was nothing romantic about hiding the single best thing in his life for fear that it would be used against him. There was nothing romantic about ordering the finest man he’d ever known to take another shot, to take another life, to lay his own life on the line time and again for the sake of something neither of them could explain.

Pepper gave him a sweet smile, and he couldn’t bring himself to shatter her illusions. “Well, I think it is,” she said, “and I wanna meet the man who stole your heart.”

Clint was in the lab, suffering through another round of scans and tests. He looked up when Phil appeared, and his scowl gave way to an expression of relief.

“Please tell me you’re here to rescue me from these psychos.”

The wound in his shoulder was uncovered, and a thin streak of bright red blood trailed down his bare chest. He was pale and thin, his skin splotched with red, and the dark shadows under his eyes were cast a harsh purple in the unforgiving light of the lab. Weariness was writ in every line of his handsome face like a fresh nightmare scrawled hastily upon waking.

“We’re the ones who need rescuing,” Stark said, brandishing the instrument in his hand at Clint. “Worst. Patient. Ever. Hi, Pepper.”

“You’ve been poking at me for _three hours_ , and all you’ve come up with is that I’m probably dying.” Clint gave Phil a miserable look. “Are these assholes really the best the world has to offer? Because I’m quickly losing my faith in the promise of science.”

“We could call Stephen Strange, again,” Banner observed, to which Clint replied with a murderous glare.

“Things might go more smoothly if you would cooperate,” Phil pointed out, moving to stand close beside him, fingertips aching to rest in comfort on his shoulder.

“I’m cooperating,” Clint protested. “I am the fucking picture of cooperation. Stark’s just a jerk.”

Stark flipped a middle finger over his shoulder and went back to punching buttons on a complicated machine.

Phil sighed, turning to Pepper. “Ms Potts, may I present my husband, Specialist Clinton Barton. He’s really very charming, despite appearances.” Clint elbowed him in the ribs, and Pepper smiled sweetly.

“Tony brings out the worst in people.” She held out a hand to Clint, ignoring Stark’s indignant huff. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Specialist Barton.”

Clint took her hand uncertainly and managed a faint smile. “Uh, yeah. Likewise.”

As his fingers wrapped around hers, she gasped. “Oh my gosh. You’re freezing! Tony, what is wrong with you? Making him sit there like that.” She laid her other hand kindly over Clint’s. “I am so sorry. I’ll get you a blanket and some tea. Is jasmine alright?”

Clint looked from her to Phil in confusion. “I, um, that’s…. You don’t have t-“

“Yes, I do,” she cut him off. “If Tony’s going to keep you captive in here, the least I can do is make sure you don’t freeze to death. Especially if all he can say is that you’re _probably dying_ , which is ridiculous.”

Stark and Banner exchanged a tense glance, and Clint’s gaze dropped suddenly to his feet. Phil’s heart skidded to a hard, agonizing stop.

“Clint?”

Clint pulled his hand free of Pepper’s grip and didn’t look up.

Stark cleared his throat. “Well, there’s bad news, and there’s good news. The bad news is that he’s, uh, probably dying.”

“The wound won’t stop bleeding,” Banner told Phil. “We’ve tried everything we can think of, including a few folk remedies, but the blood won’t coagulate. Iron levels keep dropping, no matter what we give him, and SHIELD’s reporting the same thing for the other affected personnel. At this rate….” He broke off, looking away.

“At this rate,” Stark continued, “he’ll need regular transfusions just to stay alive. Which is, y’know, a temporary solution, but it’ll give us more time. Not a lot, but maybe enough. Assuming we can get a supply of blood. Because saline’s not gonna cut it.”

Phil’s mouth felt dry, and his hands, hanging by his sides, seemed unbearably empty. “That won’t be a problem,” he said, because there was, at least, one thing he had to offer. “We have the same blood type. I can give whatever he needs.”

Clint gave him a sideways glance, and Banner blinked at him. “Well, that’s… poetic.”

Clint snorted. “It’s… what did you call it? A ‘statistical quirk’?”

“I believe the exact words I used were ‘serendipitous’ and ‘very fucking lucky’,” Phil replied.

“Fucking lucky,” Clint agreed, and the smile flickering on his lips drew some of dread out of Phil’s heart.

He pulled his eyes away from Clint and asked, “You said there was good news?”

“The good news,” Banner said, “is that we figured out what’s causing it.”

“It’s actually only kind of good news,” Stark added, “but it’s more than we had. And, I might add, more than the SHIELD hacks could get. So.”

Banner ignored him and went on, “Whatever Loki did caused a cascading molecular change in the subjects’ blood cells. It’s altering cell structure in a way that irreversibly corrupts the blood chemistry, targeting a specific aspect to be destabilized. Right now, the process is too slow to be an effective biological weapon, but the rate of change appears to be accelerating as the altered cells approach critical mass. The transfusions will slow the destabilization, but until we fin-“

“What my esteemed colleague is trying to say,” Stark cut in, “is that the iron in Barton’s blood is being, for lack of a better word, alchemically transmuted.”

Phil blinked. “Transmuted? Into what?”

“Gold,” Clint said, rubbing miserably at his eyes. “Because Loki is a dick with a sense of irony.” Something sparked in his expression, and he flashed Phil a grin. “Hah. _Iron_ y.”

Phil rolled his eyes.

“Wait, so what does that mean?” Pepper looked between Stark and Phil with an expression of anguished concern.

Clint sighed. “It means I’m dying. Slowly and probably in a lot of pain. And the only thing these assholes can come up with is ways to make it go slower.” He shook his head, and started pulling off the sensor pads stuck to his neck and chest. “I’ve had enough for today, guys. Thanks for trying.”

He slid off the exam table, and Phil caught him as he stumbled. Pepper watched them with tears in her eyes, a hand covering her mouth. “No… no, there’s got to be a… cure or something.” She turned her eyes on Stark and Banner, bewildered and determined. “There’s got to be something you can do.”

Clint steadied himself and pushed away Phil’s arm, stalking silently out of the room. Every inch he put between them felt like a drop of something slipping past, leaving Phil more and more bereft.

“We don’t know, Pepper,” Banner admitted quietly. “We’re trying, but we just don’t know.”

Phil didn’t see Clint again until the sun had set on another fruitless day. He came shuffling to bed, wan and exhausted, and for once let Phil hold him, a fragile shelter against the oncoming dark.

That night, Phil dreamed. Not the nightmares that had haunted him through those long months, but a sweet, halcyon vision, equal parts memory and fantasy, filled with the scent of summer and the soft, slick touch of Clint’s skin. He woke hot and aching, with his cock pressed against Clint’s hip. He sighed and pulled Clint closer, rolling his hips lazily.

Clint stirred and huffed softly. “Well, good morning.”

“Morning,” Phil mumbled into his shoulder. His skin was too cold, his voice too weak, but he was real and here and alive and everything Phil had ever needed. “How’re you feeling?”

Clint shrugged and watched Phil through half-lidded eyes. He looked terrible. He looked _worse_. “S’just another day.”

“Another day,” Phil repeated. “First of many more.” He pressed a slow, lingering kiss to Clint’s dry lips. There was a bitter taste to it, cut by the sweetness of simply being here. Clint opened up for him, and Phil pressed deeper, dragging his hand across the muscles of Clint’s flat belly.

This was it, this nearness. This was what he had dreamed of and longed for in the endless hours he had spent captive to another man’s name.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I missed you.”

Clint smiled against his mouth. “Yeah, I could tell.” He slipped his hand between them and palmed Phil’s hardening cock. “Missed you, too.”

The words weren’t big enough. Phil could have used every word in every language he had ever learned, and it still wouldn’t be enough. He kissed Clint harder and shifted so that their hips were flush together, the feel of Clint’s body as familiar and necessary as the rhythm of his pulse. He knew every movement and sigh the way he knew the sound of his own name.

Phil paused, pulling away. “Are you alright?”

Clint frowned. “I…. Yeah, fine. Why?”

“It’s just…. I don’t know. Something seems… off.” Phil eased back, and Clint rolled his eyes.

“Gee, I wonder if that’s because I’m slowly being poisoned to death with magic.”

Something icy stabbed at Phil’s throat. “Well,” he said quietly. “I suppose there is that.”

“Hey.” Clint reached for him as he pulled away. “Hey, wait. I didn’t-“

“You’re not going to die.” The edge of conviction in his voice was a razor across his tongue, leaving his speech in ribbons. “You’re not going to die.”

Clint dropped back to the bed with a sigh. “I am, though. If not from this, then from something else,” he said. “But probably from this.”

“No. Not from this. Not f-.” Phil broke off, shaking his head. “Clint, I can’t.”

For a long, still moment, Clint gave him a blank stare. Then, the stare resolved into a cold scowl, and Clint spat, “Fuck you.”

Phil sat back, startled. “What?”

“Fuck you,” he said again slowly, hauling himself up and out of bed. “You goddamn asshole. After what you…. You were _dead_. For six months. You were gone. So don’t you fucking dare sit there and tell me you _can’t_.”

Phil opened his mouth, then closed it again. A thousand excuses and apologies swelled up behind his teeth, each more empty and bitter than the last. “I’m sorry,” he said, because there was nothing else to say.

Clint shook his head. The bandage over the bullet wound had soaked through in the night and was a splash of bright red on his bare shoulder. He was so pale. Gingerly, he pulled on a jacket, and there was no remorse in his voice as he replied, “Yeah, me too.”

He left without another word, and Phil spent too long deciding whether to go after him. By then, he was gone, vanished to one of the high, quiet places where no one else could follow. Phil didn’t waste the energy trying to find him and went instead to the cold, bright lab, offering up all the blood he could in the hope that it would keep Clint alive long enough to make this right.

Three days later, Erik Selvig died, and Phil made a decision.


	3. citrinitas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The warnings apply extra strong in this chapter. If you're not sure, there are details and spoilers in the end notes on this chapter.
> 
> Proceed with caution.

Stark and Banner and the combined intellect of every scientist and magic user in SHIELD’s database had yielded nothing more than seeping tracks on Clint’s arms where one needle after another had filled his veins with Phil’s blood. Nothing worked, nothing slowed the poison’s progress, and nothing eased the pain in Clint’s tired eyes.

He spent most of his time confined to the lab, under Stark’s ever more manic scrutiny, and the remaining hours hiding in the corners and crawl spaces he could still reach. Phil told himself it was a normal response, that Clint hiding from an emotional threat was hardly something new. But now the bed was empty more nights than not, and it was cold.

He told Stark first what he meant to do, and Stark gave him a strangely sober look. “Y’know, I thought of that,” he said. “Figured it was a long shot, at best. I’m still not sure it’s a good idea.”

“It’s a terrible idea,” Phil admitted, “but, at the moment….”

“Yeah, yeah. Not a lot of options.” Stark prodded at the tablet in his hand, moving data around like there might be answers in some new configuration. Without looking at Phil, he asked, “So what did he do?”

It was a vague, innocuous question, but Phil knew well enough not to miss Stark’s meaning. Still, he hesitated, and Stark glanced up.

“You said you shot him, which means he did or was about to do something really stupid,” Stark explained. “Considering the last time I saw him, he was trying to drown himself in cheap liquor, I’ve got a theory about what that something stupid was, and I think that this whole situation might be just a little bit worse than you’re letting on.”

“He’s dying,” Phil pointed out. “How could it be worse?” Stark gave him a hard look, and Phil took a deep breath. “He put a gun in his mouth.”

Stark blinked. “What, like, actually physically stuck a gun between his teeth?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Phil thought about Clint’s shaking hands and bright red blood and passed a hand over his eyes. “But he’s not…. I believe that particular danger has passed.” Stark hummed in reply. “What?”

“What? Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, you know him better than I do. I’m sure you’re right. We’ll just fix this hocus pocus STD, and everything’ll be peachy.” Stark paused. “Wow, that was an especially insensitive joke. Anyway, you just do what you gotta do. Me and Bruce will hold down the fort here, and Natasha can sit on Barton and make sure he doesn’t have an extra shot of crazy.”

“That’s… strangely comforting. Thank you.”

Stark shrugged and waved him off. “Go do your interrogation thing. I’ve got data to run. And tell Barton that asshole from SHIELD medical wants to do another MRI.”

Clint was considerably less sanguine about Phil’s intention.

“You want to do _what_?”

“It’s our best chance to get answers.”

“Loki won’t give you answers,” Clint snapped. “He’ll talk you in circles and tear you apart, and he won’t tell you a damn thing.”

“I know that, but-“

“No.” Clint slammed a fist against the wall. The blood from his shoulder seeped through his shirt and left a dark, wet mark. “No, you don’t. You don’t know. You don’t get it. Loki, he…. He gets in your head, even without that stupid stick. I can still hear him. All the shit he said is still stuck in my head.” He rubbed at his temples as if the pressure would force away whatever strange whispers haunted him. “If you go, if you try to talk to him…. Just don’t, okay? It’s not worth it.”

“Not worth it?” Exhaustion and cold rage pulled at the thin edges of Phil’s frayed temper. “This is your _life_. It’s worth….” _My heart, my soul, whatever it takes._ “I’m not just going to sit here and wait. If there’s any chance-“

“There’s not,” Clint cut him off, turning away. “It’s a waste of time. This whole thing is a waste of time.”

He was so pale, so weak he could hardly stand, so lacking in the bright fearlessness that had always surrounded him like sunlight. Phil moved toward him, and Clint took a step back.

“What are you talking about? What’s a waste of time?”

Clint shook his head. “Nothing. Forget about it.”

“Clint.”

“Don’t.” Clint sank into a chair and wouldn’t look at him. “You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do. Doesn’t matter what I say.”

“Of course it does. Please, just talk to me.” He laid a hand on Clint’s shoulder, and Clint flinched away so violently that Phil’s knuckles rapped against the back of the chair. Phil drew back slowly. “Clint, please.”

Hadn’t they done this already? It hardly seemed like a moment since he’d pled and begged and shot Clint away from an edge he didn’t understand, and now it felt like the same scene played out on a different stage. Maybe he’d have to shoot Clint again, Phil thought darkly. Or stab him.

“Don’t go,” Clint said. “Don’t go to Loki. Don’t let him fuck you up, not for me.”

“I have to. If there’s any chance at all that I can get something out of him, I have to try,” Phil told him plainly. “And if you haven’t figured by now that this is the least of what I would do for you, then clearly I need to improve my communication skills.”

Clint gave an angry snort and crossed his arms, wincing at the pull on his shoulder. “Well, that’s the fucking problem, isn’t it? You’ve always gotta jump in front of the bullet. Or the homicidal god with the spear.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Phil snapped. “Just wait on the sidelines and watch everyone else take the hits? Am I supposed to just watch you die?”

“If you’d stayed dead, you wouldn’t have to,” Clint shot back. “If you’d stayed wherever the fuck you were, I would’ve just shot myself and saved everyone a whole shitload of trouble.”

“Clint….”

Clint looked him square in the eye and growled, “Why’d you even come back? What’s the point, if this is all there is?”

That struck Phil like a slap in the face. “For you,” he said. “I came back for you.”

“Well, the joke’s on you, then,” Clint replied coldly. “There’s no more me to stick around for.”

It was like dropping through a crack in ice to drown in the freezing lake below. Phil’s insides felt suddenly awash in an inescapable flood of dismay like winter water. After everything, after the endless empty months alone and the nightmare days of being so close, now Clint held his gaze with unyielding blue eyes and told him it was for nothing.

It was spoken in anger, spoken in fear. It had to be.

Before he could find the words for a denial, Clint let out a harsh laugh and said simply, in no uncertain terms, “You shoulda stayed dead. Woulda been easier.”

There was no answer for that, and Phil turned and walked from the room in silence.

He went to Central Park, to the place where Thor had stood to bring Loki and the tesseract back to Asgard. It was dark, as dark as it ever could be in any corner of Manhattan, and the sharp shadows around the small plaza seemed sinister. Standing in the center, he cleared his throat, and looked up at the black night sky.

“Uh, excuse me, Mister Heimdall, my name is Agent Phil Coulson, with the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistics Division. I’m an… acquaintance of Thor.” He spoke in a clear, plain voice, resisting the impulse to shout or to plead. The gatekeeper would hear him and answer or not, and no amount of wailing would affect the outcome. “It’s imperative that I speak with Thor immediately.”

The sky didn’t answer, and the cacophony of New York at night closed in on him.

“I realize this is unorthodox,” he went on, struggling for calm, “but this is a matter of life and death. Please, I need t- I must speak with Thor.”

There was a distant boom of thunder but no clouds in the dark sky.

Phil paused, listening. “Hello?”

He had just enough time to register the ring of light appearing above him before he was surrounded in a dazzling corona and wrenched upward into nothingness.

No sooner had solid ground returned beneath his feet than he was lifted off of them in a crushing embrace, and a loud voice rang in his ear, “Son of Coul! This is joy beyond measure!”

“Thor. It’s good to see you.” He blinked to clear his vision, and saw that he was in a round, gilded chamber. An imposing, stern-faced man stood gripping a massive sword, watching the proceeds with impassive interest.

Thor released him and stepped back, both hands still resting heavily on Phil’s shoulders. “My friend, I thought you dead at Loki’s hand. It gladdens my heart to see it is not so.”

“It was pretty close,” Phil admitted, and Thor beamed at him.

“We shall feast in your honor!” Thor declared. “All Asgard shall hear the deeds of Coul’s brave son, and songs of your courage will be sung throughout the realms!”

The memory of Clint’s cold voice still echoed in Phil’s ears. _You shoulda stayed dead._ The last thing Phil wanted was feasting and song. “That’s very generous, but I’m afraid there’s no time.”

Thor’s face darkened. “Aye, you spoke of life and death. Tell me what aid the Son of Odin might offer, and I swear it will be given.”

“It’s….” He thought of weeks in the hospital and months in another man’s life and the slow, steady spill of blood from the unhealing bullet hole in Clint’s shoulder. “It’s a long story.”

Thor smiled gently and led him out onto the long, shining bridge toward the eternal city of the Aesir. “Then begin where you must and speak with haste.”

Phil told him everything, even things he hadn’t meant to, and he suspected that Thor could hear the truth wherever words failed. Thor grieved openly to learn that Selvig had died and that Clint had sunk so low. When Phil repeated Clint’s parting shots, the corners of Thor’s mouth hardened.

“If your love is as you say, then surely it is the magic’s poison which makes him speak so cruelly.”

Phil hoped with all his heart that Thor was right, but he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever he says, however he really feels, I can’t let him die.”

Thor nodded, leading him through the gates of the sparkling palace. Under other circumstances, Phil would have been awed by the splendor of this place and overwhelmed by the simple fact that he was on an alien world, walking paths where few, if any, humans had tread. Under other circumstances, the beauty of Asgard would not have seemed to be mocking him and the ugly fear that tore him up with every passing second.

“In one thing, though, I am of a mind with the mighty archer,” Thor said. “I believe it is unwise to seek answers from Loki’s lying tongue.” He raised a hand before Phil could protest. “All the learning and magic of Asgard is yours, and the finest healer in the nine realms shall return with you to Midgard to tend your warrior husband. This you shall have, and more at the asking.”

“Thank you. That’s… that’s a lot. Thank you.” Phil wanted that to be enough, but he couldn’t shake the chilling certainty that it wasn’t. “I’d still like to talk to Loki.”

Thor frowned. “If that is the course you choose, I will not dissuade you from it, but what you ask… it is no simple thing.” He gave Phil a searching look and went on, “Loki is bound more harshly than any villain in the memory of our people. Few are permitted to approach him, and leave to do so must be granted by more voices than mine. I need no persuading, my friend, but you must convince my advisors that there is wisdom in your wish.”

Phil had talked a lot of people into doing a lot of things, but talking a council of immortal beings into letting him confront a genocidal traitor in order to save his dying lover was a little outside his realm of experience. “I, uh, I’m not entirely sure how to go about making that argument.”

“Speak plainly,” Thor advised. “You are a warrior, and a warrior’s honesty will avail you, as will the depth of your love for Hawk-eyed Barton.”

Phil hesitated. “Is that the best course of action? I don’t want them to…. That is, I could plead for him as a brother in arms. I’m not sure that….”

Understanding dawned on Thor’s face, chased closely by a stormy scowl. “There are those on Midgard who would regard your love with disdain. I assure you that you will encounter no such barbarism from those in my house.”

“I.... Thank you.”

Still, it did little to settle Phil’s nerves as he stood under the curious stares of the rulers of Asgard, a weak speech churning in his head and his heart pounding in his throat. Only the thought of Clint’s pale skin and the memory of bright blue eyes kept his feet planted and his back straight.

“I’m Agent Phil Coulson,” he began, “with the Strategic Homeland Int-“

“We know who you are, Son of Coul.” He was interrupted by a stately woman with a kind smile. “My son has told many tales of your courage. While I should be pleased to hear those deeds recounted in your own words, I think, perhaps, that you are anxious to set matters in motion and would as soon dispense with formalities and introductions.

Phil stifled a sigh of relief. “Yes, ma’am, I would. Thank you.”

“You are most welcome, brave warrior,” she replied warmly. “Now pray tell us why it is that a champion of Midgard so desperately seeks words with deep-imprisoned Loki.”

Phil swallowed a surge of nerves, but he grasped at the faint memory of Clint’s laugh and steeled himself. “In his attempt to subjugate Earth, Loki used the tesseract’s power to control the minds of a few... useful individuals,” he explained, slipping into the familiar rhythm of professionalism as best he could. It was a briefing, just like any other. “Those who survived were freed from Loki’s control and seemed to have suffered no significant lasting effects. However… however, it now appears that the… magic left some kind of residual poison, and all the survivors have become very seriously ill. One of them, Doctor Erik Selvig, recently passed away as a result of this illness.”

Thor’s jaw tightened, and he looked away. Phil’s connection to Selvig had been limited to a handful of tense encounters and Clint’s irritated insistence that the good doctor was one lab accident away from a fully fledged mad scientist. Even so, Thor grieved, and Phil felt for him.

“Our scientists have been unable to find a cure, and our people are running out of time,” he went on. “If there’s an answer, I believe it may be here, and that Loki knows what it is.”

“Loki spoke of no such poison,” said a tall, fierce woman seated to Thor’s left. “It is unlike him to remain silent when he has wrought some mischief, though silence is now his lot.”

“He is rather prone to boasting,” agreed the fair-featured man beside her.

“If he’ll boast to anyone about this, I think it’ll be to me,” Phil told them. “I… my people… we embarrassed him, and one of... one of the people he took – that he poisoned – is my husband.” A few of the Asgardians sat up straighter in their chairs. “This isn’t just mischief, it’s malice. It’s personal. And I-” He broke off, trying to catch the things tumbling out of his mouth.

Thor put up a hand. “Forgive me, my friend, but it must be known.” To the others, he said, “The Son of Coul’s warrior-wed is also a champion of Midgard, of those heroes called Avengers that I name brothers in battle. He is an archer of unsurpassed skill, and is an honorable man of keen eye and true heart. Such a man should die with a mighty weapon in his hand, after a long life and many victories, and be admitted at once to the halls of fair Valhalla. It is an injustice most grave to think that he might be slain by treacherous poison.”

“He won’t be. He can’t.”

Phil didn’t realize he’d spoken until all eyes were on him. It seemed wrong, somehow, to talk about death in battle and how Clint was a great hero when all Phil could think of was the sound of his voice when he first woke up and the lines of sorrow around his mouth that seemed to deepen with every mission.

“I know there are other lives at stake, and I know I’m hardly the first man to….” Phil took a deep breath, somehow inhaling the smell of leather and oil and steel that clung to Clint’s skin. “When Loki took him, I thought he was gone. When Loki stabbed me, I thought _I_ was gone. Now, after all that, I have to watch him waste away, and I….” He trailed off. They were regarding him with looks of sympathy and sadness, and he couldn’t stand it. “Please. Loki knows what he’s done. Let me talk to him. He’ll tell me everything just to see how badly it hurts.”

The look Thor gave him was pained, but he spoke with resolve. “You speak wisely, my friend. I would grant this request.” To the council, he asked, “What say you?”

The debate was tense but mercifully brief, and Phil released an aching breath when Thor’s call for a final vote was answered with a chorus of “Aye”s.

“The Lady Sif will bring you to Loki’s cell,” Thor said. “I would accompany you, but my brother’s rage is sharpened by my presence.”

Phil nodded. “I understand. Thank you, I…. Thank you.”

Thor clapped him soundly on the shoulder and gave him a wide smile. “When the Hawk-eyed archer regains his strength, I shall feast you both as kings and call for a ballad to be written of your great love and mighty courage. For now, I will summon the most learned mage to attend you upon your return to Midgard.”

Phil imagined Clint at a banquet table, surrounded by food and serenaded with songs about his own life. It would be worth it just to see his face. “Thank you,” Phil repeated, because there was nothing else he could say.

Sif, the fierce woman clad in fine leather armor, led him through an endless maze of stone passages, ever angled downward. The air grew more stale and warm as they went, and Phil resisted the urge to loosen his tie. He was already facing Loki with his heart on his sleeve; he refused to do it looking rumpled.

As they paused before a heavy iron door, Sif cast him a thoughtful glance. “It is uncommon, here, for two warriors to be wed,” she remarked. “More often, a man’s wife remains to guard the household while he goes soldiering.”

“It’s not unheard of, on my world. Though it’s a little unusual in my… particular sort of soldiering.” Phil hesitated. “We keep a lot of secrets, we go for weeks without seeing each other, and we’re both in more or less constant danger. It’s not exactly easy.”

“It is my understanding that marriage is never an easy thing, soldiering or no,” Sif replied with a thin, wry smile, “and any love which runs an easy course will shatter upon the first stone.”

Phil thought of late nights and long missions, of a light on in the window and the endless wire wrapped around his heart at one end and Clint’s at the other, stretched across impossible distances to keep them bound. “No. No, I suppose you’re right.

Loki’s cell was deep below the shining city, deeper than Phil could say for sure. It seemed they had been walking for hours before they came to a massive door made of iron bands and dark, rough oak.

“I shall remove the mask which binds his tongue,” Sif told him. “Question him as you will, but remember that words have ever been his weapon of choice and truth may cut more deeply than lies.”

Phil nodded, swallowing the sudden jolt of misgiving in his throat. Loki had stabbed him, had _killed_ him, had violated and poisoned Clint, had led an assault to subjugate and enslave an entire planet, and now Phil was going to stroll in and ask him a few polite questions with Clint’s life hanging in the balance.

Just like any other interrogation, he told himself. Just another monster in chains with answers that Phil needed. Just another day at the office.

Sif pulled a lever, and the great door swung slowly open with a groan of wood and metal.

The cell was a cavernous space, its curved walls glinting in the soft, amber light that issued from some unseen source. The stone floor was inlaid with polished wood in the shape of runes and patterns that spiraled in toward the center of the room and the single, bent figure that was bound there.

Loki was on his knees, his back forced into an arc that angled his face toward the high ceiling. As they approached, Phil could see the tension in Loki’s limbs, in the bindings that wound around his arms, and he could see the sharp flinch as if, every few moments, Loki was being struck.

There was no sound in the room but the strange, soft echo of droplets falling and spattering onto flesh and what sounded like the faint whisper of scales.

“Stay your torment, serpent,” Sif called. “A noble warrior of Midgard would have words with the prisoner.”

There was a quiet, rumbling hiss, and the slow dripping ceased. Loki visibly relaxed, though he tensed again as Sif came close. She loosened the ties that held him in place, and his back straightened, allowing him to face forward and for Phil to see the wicked mask that covered the lower half of his face.

When he caught sight of Phil, his eyes narrowed in puzzlement, but they cast instantly back to Sif as she began to undo the fastenings on the mask. Once free, he worked his jaw with an audible pop and spoke in a voice brittle with disuse. “If you must disturb my rest, at least bring me something better than an ugly mortal.” The corner of his thin mouth curled. “Though I can hardly object to seeing you, my lady.”

Sif rolled her eyes and stepped away without reply. Phil cleared his throat.

“I’m surprised you don’t remember me,” he said mildly. “But I guess you did stab a lot of people.”

Loki’s brow twitched, a flicker of recognition. “Ah. You.” His cold smile widened. “Those pitiful heroes went into battle with your name on their lips. Strange that they should avenge so unremarkable a man, especially one who isn’t dead.”

“There was a miscommunication.”

“I see.” Loki’s eyes were a cold, pure green, like the reflection of springtime in an icy mirror. “And have you returned from the dead to taunt me with your empty victory? To mock me in my bonds?”

Phil met his gaze. “I think you know why I’m here.”

“Ah, yes. The power of the tesseract does leave it’s mark on mortal hearts,” Loki said, clearly pleased with his work. “And how is Agent Barton faring? Or has he already taken his own life in guilt and despair?”

Phil would not let that sting, would not betray the jolt that sent through him. “He’s alive.”

Loki’s laugh echoed sharply in the cavernous cell. “But I’ve played this scene before. Who is this man that clever mortals are so intent on bargaining for his life? Agent Romanov claimed a debt to be paid, but you? Surely you can find another body to warm your bed, Agent Coulson. Though perhaps not one so finely formed.”

_Everything_ , Loki had said. Clint told him everything, and Phil had wondered just what that entailed. Now, he supposed, he had his answer. “Guess I’m just sentimental,” he replied as blandly as he could. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“Oh, I understand,” Loki drawled. “I understand lust, the longing to possess, to lay claim to flesh, and Barton was truly a pleasure to own.”

Phil didn’t react. He didn’t. Loki lied, he told himself, and even if it was true.... If it was true, then he would find out from Clint, and then he would come back and strangle Loki with his bare hands. “You never owned him.” The edge of murder in his voice was fine and sharp. “You stole him.”

“I set him free,” Loki snapped, “and he was grateful. You should have seen how eagerly he knelt.”

“You know, there are easier ways to get a date than mind control,” he said, but Loki just gave him a chilling smile.

“Does it vex you to think of your lover on his knees for me?” Loki’s voice was sweet and cold, and Phil could feel it working in his head. “Tell me, Agent Coulson, when you mount him, what name does he call?”

“God’s,” Phil shot back, “just not yours.”

Loki gave a sharp laugh, and his smile twisted. “Oh. Clever.”

Loki was baiting him, wasting his time, and Phil had officially had enough. “Tell me how to save him.”

The cold grin flickered and hardened. “You demand the promise without asking the price. Hardly wise.”

“Price isn’t an issue. I want answers.” The part of him that recalled the fairytales of his childhood knew, even as he spoke, that he would regret those words.

“Many will say so, until payment is due,” Loki replied. “Make me an offer, Agent Coulson. Tell me what that broken whore’s life is worth to you.”

Phil swallowed, but his throat was dry. “Whatever it takes.”

“Your life? Your soul?” Loki asked, grinning. “Would you give your whole being for his?”

“Of course.”

“And the life of another?” he demanded. “Is any soul a fair bargain to have him whole?”

Phil hesitated, just a half-second, just long enough to know that, in the end, there was only one true answer. “Yes.”

Loki’s brows lifted, and Phil wondered if he was genuinely surprised. “You would, wouldn’t you? You would slit the throat of an innocent for the sake of a killer with a soft mouth and supple legs.”

His tone was pleased, even gleeful, and Phil’s stomach turned. He didn’t answer, a silent acknowledgment of his own selfish truth.

“A touching sentiment, were it not so depraved. I doubt even Barton himself knows the depths to which you would sink. He would be disgusted. If you told him honestly, he would likely bite his own tongue off to be spared your villainy.”

Phil didn’t react. He didn’t think about the bullet wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding and the cut of vicious words. _You shoulda stayed dead._

“It makes no difference, of course, whatever sacrifice you make,” Loki went on. “You can give him the last drop of your heart’s blood, and he will still be lost to you. No medicine or magic will alter what my power has written in his blood, and you will watch Barton perish knowing that he was mine to the end of his days.”

Every part of Phil was frozen but for that last, desperate inch of searing rage. He took six measured steps forward ‘til he was near enough to feel the prickling of his skin at Loki’s closeness. In a soft, empty voice, he said slowly, “I’m not going to kill you right now, out of respect for your brother, but I want to make one thing perfectly clear: if Clint dies, so do you.”

He paused, watching the shift of muscles in Loki’s face, then went on, “Bearing that in mind, is there anything you would like to tell me?”

Loki’s smile was as sharp and cold as the blade he had slid between Phil’s ribs, and it seemed to cut just as deeply. “Give Agent Romanov my regards.”

Phil turned on his heel and walked away, his shoes clicking on the smooth floor.

Nothing. Loki had given him nothing. Even as he thanked Sif and Thor and the council and promised to return under better circumstances, he couldn’t help but think that there would be no better circumstances. Nothing would ever be better or good or bright in his life again, not if he lost the one true thing he’d ever have.

The stout, serious woman who accompanied him back to earth was identified as a master healer, which Phil understood to mean that she was some esoteric combination of doctor, scientist, historian, and magician. He was and would always be hesitant to trust any mystical answers, but magic had wrought this horror; maybe magic could fix it. 

He went to Stark’s lab with a weary heart. He’d left with a desperate hope and returned with empty hands, but Stark’s curious glance fell instantly on Phil’s companion and lit up.

“You brought me an alien!” he said. “Just what I always wanted.”

Phil shook his head to clear away the clutter of hopelessness. “Mister Stark, this is-”

“My name is Groa,” the woman interrupted curtly, “and I wish to see my patient.”

There was ice in Phil’s stomach at the thought of facing Clint. At least Clint would get the satisfaction of knowing he’d been right, that questioning Loki had been every bit as ill-advised and pointless as he’d predicted. _He’ll talk you in circles and tear you apart._

Stark grinned. “Okey dokey. Down to business.” To Phil, he said, “You wanna go wake up your sleeping princess? He kinda freaks out if anybody but you or Romanov does it.”

Phil couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at that. “He’s a professional sniper whose personal history is mostly a laundry list of various traumas. What did you expect?”

“Okay, fair enough, but the point stands.”

He’d seen Clint break a medic’s nose when roused from a dead sleep. An analyst had tried to wake him up while he was napping in the corner of a mission control center, and he’d put three agents on the floor before he caught up to himself. Once, he’d even taken a swing at Phil. SHIELD psych had a few things to say about that one.

“I’ll go see if he’s up to it,” Phil said. “Maybe you can bring doc- Groa up to speed on your... progress.”

Groa scowled, but Phil thought that might be her resting face. “Be hasty. Reports of primitive remedies will hardly be useful.”

Phil left before he could hear Stark’s answer to that.

The elevator ride from the research level to the high floor set aside for he and Clint seemed at once unusually quick and agonizingly slow. He dreaded telling Clint that Loki had given nothing and that he would have to submit to yet another round of prodding and questions. Even so, the bitterness of their row lingered like bile in the back of his throat, and he wanted to wash it away with better words and a brief kiss.

Approaching the bedroom door, he paused. The suite was mostly dark. There was no movement, no sound, nothing out of place.

And yet.

“I didn’t think you’d be one to hover.”

Natasha materialized at the corner of his vision. There were few enough nooks and recesses throughout the tower, but she found them easily enough. “Someone has to keep an eye on him.”

Natasha didn’t give her concern lightly, but she always seemed to have more than enough for Clint. “You’re hovering,” he said.

“Perhaps,” she replied coolly. “I take it the mission was a bust.”

_He will still be lost to you._ “Thor sent a healer. She wants to see her new patient.”

Natasha regarded him silently, understanding. She knew. He didn’t need to tell her that Loki had done precisely as predicted, had cast all his convictions into doubt and left him no hope to show for it. After a moment, she tilted her head toward the door and said, “He’s been in there since you left. You’ll probably want to force some food in him.”

Phil nodded. Clint, in the way of so many kids who grew up with so little, had a way of inhaling any food that was put in front of him, as if afraid it would vanish if he looked away. That he turned it away now was one more unsettling disconnect between this pale stranger and the man Phil had spent his days and nights beside.

He pushed open the door, slowly and silently, and the abrupt sense of utter, inexplicable wrongness struck him in the chest like a punch. 

Even in the pitch darkness, he knew there was no one there. The bed was empty, the covers straight, and Phil knew without touching that they would be cold, unslept upon since the night before.

“Clint?” he called, and it chilled him to the core to think how very little he expected an answer.

He switched on the light and blinked against the brightness. There on the bed, propped against his pillow, was a stark white square of paper. 

On it were three words in Clint’s sharp, slanted script, written in black ink with clean, unerring certainty.

_This is better._

Everything in Phil’s head shut down. 

He stared at the words, his head as blank as the empty white around them. There was a distant sense that he should think, that he should feel, should act, should....

_This is better._

He opened his mouth, and nothing came out. He closed it and swallowed.

_This is better._

The stark square of paper was taken from his hand. He heard Natasha’s sharp breath and wondered numbly if he had gasped, if he could make noise at all.

_This is better._

The muscles in his throat moved, forcing air and sound up into his mouth and through his lips.

“Jarvis.”

His voice was nothing, a hoarse whisper against the static in his mind.

“ _Yes, Agent Coulson?_ ”

He opened his mouth, and nothing came out. He closed it and swallowed.

“Where is Agent Barton?”

There was a pause, a hesitation, and what did it mean when an artificial intelligence with unheard of processing power hesitated?

“ _I... seem to have lost track of him, sir, though my security log shows him last entering the bathroom of your suite._

“What do you mean you’ve lost track of him?” Natasha demanded, but Phil was already turning toward the closed bathroom door.

It was eight steps, and he could never be sure if he took a heartbeat or a lifetime to make them. His head was all blank space and white noise.

_This is better._

He could hear it in Clint’s voice, the same voice that kept echoing _You shoulda stayed dead_. He heard it it in the same voice that said _Shoot_.

The door was locked. He levered his shoulder against it and pushed, but the lock held. He threw his full weight against it, but the lock held. He slammed himself into it, but the lock held. He slammed into again, but the lock held. Again, but it held. Again, again, again, again, and what was this door made of and why wouldn’t it break and he had to get through had to get to Clint because Clint needed him and Clint and Clint and _Clint_.

He didn’t know he was shouting until a sob shattered the word in his throat, and he just kept throwing himself against the door.

Natasha grabbed him by the collar and jerked him roughly out of the way. In a voice that was as iced-over and empty as Phil’s thoughts, she commanded, “Jarvis, open the door.”

The light in the bathroom was low, soft, a warm glow from recessed fixtures. The white tile floor stretched from the door to a massive tub, beside which stood a large shower enclosed in glass.

Clint sat inside the shower with his back to the wall, legs splayed out in front of him, head fallen forward onto his chest. Bright red blood pooled on the tiles around him, running out from a deep, straight gash in his wrist.

Natasha swore. Phil walked forward. He knelt. He checked Clint’s pulse, weak and thready but present. He pulled off his belt and wrapped it around Clint’s arm as a tourniquet. He took off his jacket, tie, and dress shirt. He folded his dress shirt and pressed it to the wound. He wrapped his tie around the compress to hold it in place. He bent Clint’s arm at the elbow to help slow the bleeding. He checked Clint’s pulse again, still weak, possibly fading.

Natasha was speaking, calling for help.

Phil waited.

Rogers entered the room. He spoke, dismayed and urgent. He knelt. He slid his arms under Clint and lifted. He carried Clint away, shouting.

_This is better._

Phil was kneeling in a puddle of blood. Clint’s blood. So bright. Shining.

_This is better._

Natasha spoke, but Phil was kneeling in a puddle of Clint’s blood. It was going to ruin his trousers.

_This is better._

The blood was so bright. He leaned forward and pressed his hands into the red. It was cold, sticky.

Natasha touched him, but Clint’s blood was on his hands, had always been, would always be on his hands. His palms would be stained red, a mark of his sins and his grief.

Natasha slapped him hard across the face.

Phil blinked. He looked at her.

“Pull it together, Coulson,” she snapped. “Clint needs you.”

Clint.

The blood was so bright.

Natasha backhanded him hard enough to make his eyes sting, and he tasted blood in his mouth.

“Natasha.” Phil looked up. “He tried t-”

“He didn’t,” she said. “He tried, but he didn’t. He’s gonna be alright.”

Phil’s eyes burned, and his chest tightened around the emptiness inside it. “But why? How could....”

Natasha sighed. “He’s sick, in pain, and afraid.” She stood and gave him a shove with her foot. “Now get off your ass and stop acting like a child.”

He had to move, had to go, had to fight through the blank space in his head and get to Clint. His arms shook, and he didn’t trust his legs to hold him up.

Natasha kicked him, not hard enough to knock him over, but enough that he knew his ribs would be aching for days.

“Get. Up.”

Taking a deep breath, he drew one knee up and put his foot flat on the floor. Slowly, carefully, balancing himself against the wall, he stood. His hand left a wide, red streak on the glass.

No sooner was he upright than Natasha was in his face, staring him down. “Listen, Coulson. You can’t fall apart, not yet. Later, when this is done, _then_ you can have whatever kind of breakdown you need. But right now, you’ve got to keep it together. Do you understand?”

Phil nodded. His voice was lost somewhere behind the static in his head, and he couldn’t find it.

“Good,” Natasha said with a short nod. “Now clean yourself up. You’ve got a job to do.”

With that, she left, and her steps didn’t make a sound on the stark white floor.

He didn’t remember changing. Weeks, months, years later, he could never say how he made it through those few terrible minutes, but somehow he washed the blood from his skin, put on fresh clothes, made himself breathe and move and perform the actions of a fully cognizant human being. He didn’t remember anything from the moment Natasha walked away to the moment he walked into the lab and saw the rest of the team, plus Nick Fury, standing in a tight, tense formation along the wall.

He didn’t remember anything until he saw Groa shouting orders at two frantic medical researchers, Stark shouting at them to listen to her, and Banner attending the figure laid out on the exam table.

He didn’t remember anything until he saw Clint, pale and unmoving, blood falling in heavy drops to the floor below, and everything came crashing in.

Phil’s knees buckled, and he caught himself on the door frame. His vision swam, but he took a long, steady breath and forced himself to keep standing. Natasha was right; he couldn’t fall apart, not yet.

“...overrode the security protocols and blacked out surveillance to the room,” Fury was telling Pepper quietly. “It’s an impressive job. I haven’t found the backdoor he used, but Jarvis is mapping out the code trail.”

Pepper’s face was tense and pale, and of course she was focused on problem-solving and things she could fix, things she could do. _How did this happen, and how do we keep it from happening again?_ Rogers and Natasha were listening intently to the exchange, though Natasha’s eyes were slanted away, fixed on the red gash in Clint’s arm.

One of the thousand machines surrounding Clint lit up and launched into earsplitting beeping.

“Crashing,” Banner said, darkly, unsettlingly calm, and the frantic activity became even more hurried, a hurricane of movement around Clint’s still body. Banner pushed a needle into the IV, and one of the techs wheeled over yet another machine. There was the sound of something powering up and the tech lifted panels and _clear_ and -

Phil turned away, choking on bile. The white static fell over his thoughts, cold and clear and comforting and anything but this horrible, wrenching sickness. 

There was a hand on his shoulders, and Rogers was saying gently, “Come on, sir. You don’t need to see this.”

“I’m not....” Phil swallowed back the bitter taste. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Not saying you should,” Rogers replied. “I just think maybe we should close the door. Let the doctors do their job without the rest of us gaping.”

Phil looked past him to Clint, to the thick red blood pooling on the floor. Slowly, hating himself for giving in to that weakness, hating himself for needing to, he nodded. Rogers guided him into the small antechamber outside the lab and urged him down to the floor to sit with his back against the cold wall. 

The others filed out behind them, except for Natasha, who said firmly, “I’ll stay.” It wasn’t much relief, but it was some, knowing that she would stand watch for Clint while Phil couldn’t.

He just put his head in his hands and tried to breathe. Pepper sat beside him, stretching an arm around his shoulders, and that one, human touch made the last few pieces of his heart crumble. He felt battered and overwhelmed and lost, and hot, sharp tears welled up in his eyes.

“‘You should have stayed dead.’” All eyes turned to him in horror. “Last thing he said to me,” Phil choked out. “‘You should have stayed dead.’” He shook his head, pressing his a fist into his eye. “This is my fault.”

“Oh hell no,” Fury said so fiercely that Phil had to look up. “This is Loki’s fault. Not yours. Not Barton’s. So don’t you dare go taking that on.”

“What about you?” Phil snapped. “What about the part of this that’s your fault?”

Fury gave him a warning glare. “Coulson.”

“You lied to him. You lied to _me_.” He wasn’t shouting. His voice was cold and hard, and Fury knew him well enough to recognize the danger in that. “And for what? So you could get your toy soldiers to play nice?”

“He was compromised.” Fury shot back. “He was under enemy control for three days. He should’ve been locked up in psych the second he woke up. No way I could give him that kind of information.”

It was protocol. It made sense. But there was no space in Phil’s head for any of that. “So why wasn’t he?” he demanded. “Why, Director Fury, did you allow a potentially unstable agent, suffering from sleep deprivation and psychological abuse, to jump directly into a pitched battle against an unfamiliar opponent and then run away to self-destruct on the other side of the world? Would you call that a strong strategic decision, _Director_?”

Fury scowled down at him. “You know damn well there’s no stopping that man once he decides he’s gonna do something.” He sighed, all the fight suddenly gone out of him, and slid down the wall to sit across from Phil. “We looked for him, Phil. _I_ looked for him, but you know how good he is. Romanov and Stark tracked him down, but he wasn’t gonna come back for nothing. By the time Selvig and the rest were showing symptoms, Barton was so deep underground.... If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was dead already.”

“He’s right,” Pepper added quietly. “Tony and Natasha never stopped looking.”

Phil scrubbed his face with his hands. “I know, Pepper,” he told her softly. “I know.” Her arm around him tightened, and he thought that maybe there was warmth left in the world, after all.

“All respect, sir, but that sounds like a package of nice, neat excuses,” Rogers said. There was nothing accusatory in his tone, but there was something threatening underneath it. “And it doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell Agent Coulson that Barton was in trouble.”

Fury sighed again. “I didn’t tell him because I knew he’d do exactly what he did.” To Phil, he said, “I’m not gonna fault you for how you place your loyalty, but I’m not gonna kid myself about it, either. He’s your priority, and he has been since the day he followed you home like a goddamn stray dog.”

_Would you give your whole being for his?_ Phil laughed bitterly. “Well, you’re right about that, sir.”

There was a long silence, then Fury said in a low, tired voice, “I should have told you. I made the wrong call. I’m sorry.” He looked Phil straight on with his one good eye. “Part of this is my fault. I admit that, and I don’t expect you to forgive me for it.”

Phil returned his gaze with one full of endless sadness. “You know, boss, I think that depends on what happens next.”

The door to the lab slid open, and Stark stepped out.

Phil’s heart tried to freeze and pound all at once and wound up just shuddering painfully in his chest.

Stark, worn out and frazzled, looked around at them and said firmly, “He’s okay. Not great, and not for long, but, for now, he’s okay.”

He stumbled over and dropped down beside Pepper as Phil tried to remember how to breathe, how to move blood through his veins, how to think and feel and not be terrified.

“He can’t have been bleeding long,” Stark went on. “He’d lost less than a liter of blood. Groa managed to stop the bleeding with some Asgardian hoodoo that I don’t begin to understand, so he’s stable, for now. But the magic whatever-it-is is still there. There’s more gold than iron in his blood, at this point, and it’s just gonna keep poisoning him.” He looked at Phil wearily. “I really hope that cranky old wizard knows her shit, because I am fresh out of ideas.”

It meant nothing. It was all for nothing. Everything they did just meant Clint died more slowly. Phil thought about him on the floor of the shower. He must have been in that room for a while, locked in with the clean, white tile. Did he pace? Did he look at himself in the mirror and wonder what he was doing? Would there be stuttering red nicks on his wrist from where he held the knife, hesitating, hands shaking? What was he thinking as the blood ran out, hot and slick around him?

_You can give him the last drop of your heart’s blood, and he will still be lost to you._

“Budapest,” Phil said, and Fury gave him hard look.

“No.”

“It could work.”

“I said _no_.”

Stark raised his hand. “Excuse me. Share with the class.”

“We had a mission in Budapest,” Phil began, and Fury cut him off.

“A mission that _should_ have been a milk run.”

“It _was_ a milk run,” he went on. “We accomplished the objective, the rest of the team had been extracted, no casualties. Clint and I were doing clean-up, and....” He remembered the wire, the click that gave him just enough warning to get between Clint and the blast. “There was IED we didn’t know about. I got hit with some shrapnel.” Some. His back was a mass of scars that only ever felt like real skin when Clint’s hands were on him. “I don’t know how Clint got us out, but he did. When he contacted the command center, they gave him a timeframe for our extraction, but.... I was bleeding out, and I would have been dead long before they got there. But Clint.... He stole medical supplies from a clinic, but he couldn’t find any blood or saline. So he rigged up an IV out of whatever he could find and just kept giving me his blood until our rescue arrived.”

“Jesus,” Rogers said, impressed. “That’s pretty risky.”

“It was dangerous and stupid and he shouldn’t have done it,” Phil corrected. “And it was very fucking lucky that it worked.” To Fury, he added, “You chewed him out for that.”

“Damn right I did. And do you know what that asshole said?” Fury didn’t mimic Clint’s voice, but Phil could hear it, all the same. “He said, ‘We were gonna come back together or not at all, so fuck you very much, Director’.” 

Stark snorted. “I can’t believe this. I finally find someone who’s as much a jerk as I am, and he’s on his deathbed. Coulson, I swear to god I’m gonna save your husband. Then I’m going to steal him from you, and we’re going to live happily ever after making Fury’s life miserable.”

Phil gave him a bland look. “You’re certainly welcome to try.”

“Oh my god, don’t say that,” Pepper sighed. “He’ll take it as a challenge.”

“If he gives head like I do, it might be a competition.”

It was worth every bit of awkwardness to see the brief moment when Tony Stark looked genuinely shocked. “Is he allowed to talk like that?” Stark asked Fury. “Is that kind of language acceptable for a SHIELD agent.”

“You should hear him after a few beers.”

“That was one time, and we’d had a fight.”

“You started listing and describing his sex noises.”

Pepper gave a startled cough. Rogers, to Phil’s surprise, laughed out loud, and Stark’s eyes widened. “What, seriously?”

Fury’s expression was grimly unamused. “He got to eighty-seven.”

Phil didn’t remember what they’d been fighting about, but he remembered calling Fury and bemoaning the tragedy that the love of his life was an insufferable jackass. He remembered coming home a little worse for wear and finding Clint sitting in the kitchen looking miserable. He remembered talking and kissing and coming to some resolution, and he thought suddenly of never having that again. He thought of never having another stupid argument, of never kissing Clint again or having ridiculous make-up sex, of never watching him wake up or draw a bow or eat pizza, of never hearing his voice on the comm and knowing, even through the worry and uncertainty, that everything was going to be fine because Clint Barton had his back.

He thought of standing at yet another funeral, watching as yet another flag was folded. Only this time the flag would be handed, kindly and solemnly, to him.

“I want to see him.”

Stark frowned. “Yeah. I think... yeah. He’s still knocked out, though, and he’s... y’know, in pretty rough shape.”

“I don’t care.”

“Fair enough.” Stark climbed to his feet, less energetically than usual, and only then did Phil noticed the red in his eyes and the shadows beneath them. Stark was notorious for going days without sleep, burning through projects in a haze of manic inspiration, and what did it mean that he looked more worn and ragged now, after weeks focused on saving Clint’s life, than he had even in the grip of palladium poisoning?

Phil followed him silently back into the lab. The others stayed outside, and Phil knew they would be talking, making plans for a worst-case scenario. He wanted no part in it. His worst-case scenario was right there in front of him, pale and bloody under the harsh lights.

Groa and Banner were going over figures on a monitor, gesturing broadly and talking over each other, but they stopped when they saw Phil. The two techs were nowhere to be seen, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. He came to a stop beside Clint and stared, not at the bandages around his arm or the clean white square on his shoulder, but at his face, pale and drawn and still so very much the only thing Phil ever wanted to see.

“He has a stout heart, that one,” Groa remarked, watching Phil with a calculating look. “But it seems he cannot hear its beat.”

“She keeps talking like that,” Stark told Phil. “We have no idea what she’s saying, but she seems to know what she’s doing.”

Groa gave him a glare. “You are a fool, and your arrogance will cost your battle-brother his life.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” Stark snapped. “All this hocus pocus bullshit is getting us nowhere. This is a problem. We’re geniuses. Geniuses solve problems.”

“You are a fool,” Groa repeated acidly. “It is science, but this art is beyond you.”

Stark scoffed. “You know how you pull a rabbit out of a hat? Physics. Mechanics. Math. Loki pulled out a mean-ass rabbit, and we just have to figure out how to put it back.”

“It’s not physics,” Phil said quietly. “It’s alchemy.”

“And alchemy is a science,” Stark insisted. “It’s a bizarre, archaic, completely crazy-pants science, but it’s a science.”

Groa’s expression communicated exactly what she thought of that observation. “The Son of Coul speaks truly. The answer to this riddle is in his heart.”

_The last drop of your heart’s blood._

It was about chemicals and compounds and reactions, sure. At the most basic, fundamental levels of existence, that was what everything came down to, but that wasn’t all. This was about something precious and something base and knowing what was which. This was about the things that kept human hearts moving. This was about blood.

Suddenly, it clicked. For the first time in months, his head cleared. All the static and uncertainty vanished, and Phil knew exactly what to do.

“Mister Stark, Doctor Banner?” His voice was calm and crisp, his Agent Coulson voice, not the ragged, weary thing it had become. “Could we have a moment, please?”

Stark and Banner exchanged a look. “Look, Coulson....” Stark began, but Phil stopped him.

“I’d like to speak to Groa with as little... Midgardian bias as possible.”

Stark appeared doubtful, but Banner tilted his head toward the exit and Stark sighed. “Fine. Don’t summon any vengeful spirits in my lab. I just had the centrifuge calibrated.”

“No summoning. Noted,” Phil replied dryly, but he wasn’t paying attention. He was studying the lines around Clint’s eyes, the shape of his jaw, the curve of his lips, committing every detail to memory before it slipped beyond his hold.

They went out, and Phil thought that maybe he should say something. Goodbye. Thank you. _This is better._ But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the living kept living and the dead stayed dead.

Groa stood watching him, weighing. “You have found the answer these learned men could not.”

Phil laid a hand lightly, reverently, on Clint’s brow. His skin was so cold. “They were going about it the wrong way, trying to fight the poison. All they had to do was purge it, replace it with something clean.”

“Blood is never clean,” she told him. “It is the stuff of life, and what life is without impurity?” She shook her head, rummaging in the myriad pockets of her robes. “No. Not something clean.” She withdrew a slim, wooden box and held it out to him. “Something strong.”

In the box were two long needles connected by a coil of thin, shining tube. One was a flat, dark grey while the other glinted a rich, deep yellow, and both had long heads like handles carved out of smooth ivory. They were strange, alien things, their purpose and meaning either lost to humankind or something the denizens of Earth had never learned.

Phil knew exactly what they were for.

He looked up at Groa, his fingers still resting on Clint’s brow. “Will it work?”

She shrugged. “I know not. Mortal bodies are frail, yet not so weak as you appear. The theory, at least, is sound.”

Carefully, he withdrew the apparatus from its box. There were a thousand questions on his tongue. How did it work? How long would it take? Had she seen this done before? Were there side-effects? Would it hurt? If it failed...?

The time for questions was past, though, and he gripped the dark needle and tried to stop his hands from shaking. He pushed down the blanket covering Clint’s chest and felt along the bone for the place that every new recruit learned in emergency med training. There was already a tiny divot in Clint’s skin from a shot of adrenaline years before, and how many times had Phil touched that very mark? How many times had he spiralled kisses around it?

Never again.

“Tell them....”

“They know.”

“Tell him....”

“If he does not know, then he is a fool indeed.”

Phil nodded. He raised his hand and took a long, slow breath.

“This is better.”

He brought his fist down in a smooth arc and plunged the needle through Clint’s breastbone and deep into his heart. The impact, the sound, the sudden reddening of Clint’s skin churned in his stomach like acid, but this was it. This was the only way.

One of the machines beeped frantically, and Groa gave it a withering scowl. “You are certain?” she asked Phil.

“Yes.” And he was. With every last inch of him, he was certain.

“Then be hasty,” she said. “His time is short.”

He slid onto the exam table and cradled Clint’s head in his lap. “I’m sorry,” he said, brushing his fingertips along the edge of Clint’s hair.

No more touches. No more long, slow nights. No more dirty socks under the couch. No more bad jokes. No more blue eyes.

“This is better.”

Phil held the gold needle in both hands and shoved it unerringly into his heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the scene between Loki and Phil, Loki implies that he raped Clint while he was mind-controlled. The reference is brief and non-explicit.
> 
> Clint attempts to commit suicide by slicing his wrists, and there is a graphic description of the aftermath.


	4. rubedo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to be nice and not make you wait a whole day for this one. :)

In the dream, everything is red.

The light, the air, the sound, even the strange, transcendent sensation of fear and knowing that pervades everything comes to Phil in a deep, inescapable crimson.

It is bright and hot and vast, and there is a wire wrapped around Phil’s heart that draws him on across the endless scarlet.

He follows it into the dark, into the cold where the red drifts like flakes of snow, the frozen fall of a bleeding sky.

The wire is wrapped around a heart at each end, and he feel the pulse of the other pulling the bright red out of his skin.

He gives it, lets it go gladly, and, when the red is gone, he cuts the wire.

_It didn’t work._

He came out of the dream slowly, in fits and starts and stages, and that was the last thing Phil wanted to do. It was a dream and he was waking up and that meant something had gone wrong. It meant that he would be waking up to a world in which he had failed, in which it might already be too late.

That was not a world he had any interesting in greeting, at the moment.

Still, consciousness came inexorably on, and with it a growing ache in his chest that had only a fraction to do with the needle that had punctured it. He felt as though he had been hollowed, like his lungs and heart and muscle had been scraped out from his shell of skin. His bones were marble arches splintered by a blast, unable to bear the weight of his body.

There was a pressure on his hand, a warm palm pressed against his, and it was a tether to the waking world that would not let him go. He wanted to drift back into the cold dark, but that hand held him fast.

There was a scent, smooth spice and leather and gun oil, as familiar to him as the sound of his own name and the touch of thin metal tags against his chest. He was in their bed, then, the smell of Clint lingering in the sheets, and maybe he was still dreaming and the scent and the touch were just shadows in his waking mind.

Or maybe he was dead, after all.

The hand gripping his shifted, running a strong thumb over his wrist. The skin was rough and dented with calluses that Phil had spent years etching into his memory. He knew what those calluses felt like on the back of his neck, had spent hours and days and months longing for the drag of them.

He curled his fingers reflexively, reaching for more contact, more skin, even if it wasn’t real, and the grip around his hand tightened.

“I’ve got you, boss. It’s okay.”

It was the voice in all his worst nightmares and best dreams, worn thin but strong and sure, and that was impossible. Slowly, afraid that all these traces would vanish the moment he looked too closely, Phil cracked open his eyes.

He was met with the sight of a familiar smile and bright blue eyes.

“Good morning, asshole.”

Phil rubbed at his eyes and opened them all the way, and there Clint was, grinning tiredly back at him. “Okay, I’m definitely not dreaming,” he said. “In my dreams, you don’t call me an asshole.”

Clint snorted. “In your dreams, I’m probably naked, gagged, and flat on my back with my feet in the air.” With his free hand, he gave Phil a rough punch in the arm. “Also, you’re an asshole.”

Phil decided he would return to that mental image later. “Why am I an asshole?”

The smile turned into something thin and bitter. “What you did,” Clint said. “What you tried to do, that was....” He shook his head and punched Phil’s arm again. “It was stupid and selfish, and you’re a fucking asshole for even thinking that could ever be okay.”

Phil blinked. He was awake and alive, and this... this wasn’t the pale, hollow-eyed stranger he’d last seen. This was his partner and his lover and his best friend. This was the home that he came back to and the light that guided him.

“It worked. But then, how... what...?” Clint was watching him with a guarded expression, and a cold apprehension tightened in Phil’s stomach. “It did work?”

Clint nodded. “Oh yeah. I’m one hundred percent gold-free. Hypoallergenic, even.” Phil sank back in relief, but Clint went on, “You’re still an asshole. Jesus fuck, why would you even do that? Why would you just...?” He let go of Phil’s hand and ran his fingers through his short hair. “You could have died.”

“I thought I was going to,” Phil replied quietly. “I thought that was how it worked.”

Clint ran a hand through his short hair. “Yes and no, apparently. That Asgardian wizard lady. What’s her face? Gru?”

“Groa.”

“That. She said the thinga-ma-bob transfers as much blood or energy or whatever as you’re willing to give, and since you were ready to jump in front of the bullet _again_ , it did the trick.” He waved absently. “Something about intentions and sacrifice and all that bullshit. Anyway, they’re working on the other agents, now. I guess they had to find some people who really liked them.”

Phil couldn’t help but smile. “That could be rather difficult in Agent Park’s case.”

“His mother flew in from Vancouver.”

“Really?”

“Really. Sweet lady, apparently.”

“Huh.”

He caught Clint’s eye and held it. For a long moment, they looked at each other in silence, and Phil’s heart beat slow and hard. It seemed like a lifetime since he’d last fallen into Clint’s clear gaze, and now he never wanted to climb back out.

“Thank you,” Clint said, low and intense.

Phil smiled. “I thought I was a selfish asshole.”

“You are,” Clint replied, “but you’re mine, so that’s okay.”

Phil arched an eyebrow. “Are you sure you’re feeling alright? That was awfully sentimental.”

“Shut up, Coulson. All I’m saying is that you keep pulling me back. And I know I’m gonna have to spend some time in psych, and I’m still pissed off about the whole dead-not-dead thing. But you always pull me back, and I....” He shook his head. “I still can’t believe you shot me. Again. And then stabbed me with a magic hypodermic.”

“I stabbed myself, too,” Phil pointed out. “Let’s not forget that part.”

Clint huffed. “Yeah, not likely.” He jerked his head toward the door. “By the way, there’s a whole mess of superheroes out there waiting for several long and detailed explanations from both of us. You up for that?”

Phil sighed. A hot shower and a full meal would go a long way toward preparing him for anything, but that wasn’t his greatest concern. “Are you?”

Clint didn’t look away, didn’t flinch. He met Phil’s eyes steadily and said, “I’m a little fucked up. That’s not news to anyone. Loki got to all that stuff in my head and played with it, took the garbage and made it toxic, and I woke up all wrong inside. And then losing you....” He blinked hard, and Phil could see the strain at the corners of his eyes. Still, his gaze never wavered. “That would have screwed me up all on its own, so I lost it. What I did, what I tried to do... it’s not good. But it’s not all my fault, either.”

“No,” Phil agreed softly. “No, it’s not.”

“If I’m gonna be in the field with these guys,” Clint went on, “they need to know where my head’s at, and I’m not too proud to tell them that it lives in a pretty bad place.” He paused. “That is, of course, assuming they still want me in their little club, but considering Rogers went over to our apartment to start moving stuff over, I think we’re in.”

Phil blinked. “Captain Rogers went to our apartment?”

“Yeah. And, uh, you remember that carton of milk we threw out?” Clint winced. “Well, I think we missed a few trash days.”

Gingerly, Phil sat up in the bed, just so he could lean forward and bury his head in his hands. “That apartment was a disaster,” he muttered.

“I hear the mess was a secondary attraction,” Clint said. “Rogers found the box under the bed.”

Phil groaned into his hands, and Clint laughed. He cupped his hand gently around the back of Phil’s neck, and his callused fingers were so flawlessly familiar, they might have been part of Phil’s own skin.

“Hey,” he said softly.

Phil looked up. “Hey yourself.” He reached into the collar of his undershirt and pulled out two sets of dented dog tags. He knew by touch which was which, knew every nick and scratch in the shining discs that bore Clint’s name, and he slipped them carefully from around his neck. “I’ve got something of yours.”

The chain slid easily over Clint’s head, and Phil traced it down to where the tags rested like a stamp over Clint’s living, beating heart. He took hold of the tags at the very moment Clint’s hold on his neck tightened, and they drew each other into a fierce, burning kiss.

Phil’s throat was dry, his lips rough and cracked, but his whole being melted in the heat of Clint’s mouth, the touch of callused fingers on the back of his neck, and the taste, at last, of home.


End file.
